A Contrastive Study Of Hedging In English Abstracts Of Chinese And English Scientific Research Articles

There is a traditionally and commonly held belief that scientific writing is purely objective and informational, dealing directly with facts and truth. But a successful writing also should involve trying to persuade readers of their claims. This means that scientific papers do not only carry the writer's point of view, but arguments have to be expressed in ways that are acceptable and plausible. Hedging, as one of the very strategies, could help writers to achieve these goals.While large body of research has shown that Chinese writers lack the hedging competence in English writing compared with English native speakers, or have difficulty in interpreting their Chinese scientific writing in English effectively and accurately, even though their Chinese version is acceptable and plausible in expression by adopting hedges appropriately.Given the above discussion and based on the two self-built corpora composed of English abstracts of scientific research articles (RAs) from English and Chinese leading journals, this study identifies the forms, features and frequencies of hedges in Abstract of RAs, and makes a contrastive analysis of the two corpora, namely, NES (native English speakers) and CEL (Chinese English learners) in order to find out the similarities and differences in their use of hedges and try to dig out the factors influencing effective use of hedges by Chinese writers.Hyland, Ken's analytical framework (1998) of hedging is adopted to collect and analyze data. By means of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the final results show that there are significant differences in the use of hedges between NES and CEL, either the frequency of hedging devices, or the scope and forms of hedging items. By referring to the contrastive analysis of hedging use, influential factors behind the differences are figured, such as cultural background, English proficiency, awareness of hedging significance and hedging use and complexity of hedging itself. And finally, the corresponding pedagogical implications are suggested, which are improving awareness of hedging, intensifying hedging use and innovating materials of ESP, in hopes of shed some light on the improvement of English scientific writing by Chinese researchers in the perspective of hedging use.