A Corpus-Based Study Of Hedges In Chinese College Students' Argumentative Writings

The study is conducted to represent a contrastive research on hedges in college students' argumentative writings written in English by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers, and tends to reveal and depict certain similarities and differences which exist between them. This corpus-based study explores how hedges are manifested in students' argumentative writings, which category these hedges belong to, and what functions they have. The present study extends previous research in two ways: it extends the research field of hedges to students' writings, describes major patterns of hedges within students' argumentative writings, and differentiates them from other hedges mainly appear in published literatures; and it compares the application of hedges between learners and native speakers and looks for possible reasons.It is found that, as to the linguistic forms of hedges in the argumentative writings, 136 linguistic items, subcategorized into four groups, are used as hedges. Among which modality is the top one enormously used hedge (51% and 55% of the total number of hedges in non-native corpus and native corpus respectively). As to the overall frequency of hedges, the Chinese learners overuse hedges and a significant difference also exists in the total numbers of hedges between the two corpora. As to each sub-category of hedges, learners overuse 33 words. Some hedges are used exclusively by EFL learners while their compositions provide other words as hedges.The study will shed light on the features characteristic of Chinese college students in their use of hedges to help raise both teachers' and learners' awareness of the value of hedges in English writing.