Hedging In Literary And Medicalacademic Papers: A Contrastive Study

Hedging is an important strategy that is frequently employed in English academic writing. This strategy can indicate the writers'attitude and commitment to their propositions, show the writers'scientific honesty and deference to their peers and at the same time leave room for further discussion. So far, although many scholars have done research on hedging in academic papers, they largely concentrate on single discipline such as biology, economy and sociology, etc, while relatively little on cross-discipline or cross-writing style.This thesis presents a contrastive study of hedging in two self-compiled academic corpora, Literary Academic Papers Corpus (LAPC) and Medical Academic Papers Corpus (MAPC). Each corpus contains 20 articles which are all selected from international, professional and authoritative journals recently published in literary and medical areas and the total number amounts to about 115,024 running words.By providing both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the overall occurrences, frequencies and categories of hedging devices occurring in the two corpora, this thesis finds out the similarities and discrepancies and then tries to analyze some possible reasons interpreting the disciplinary discrepancies and discuss the functions of hedges they usually perform in academic papers.The contrastive study shows that: there exist not only some similarities but also some distinct disciplinary discrepancies on the usage of hedging devices between the two corpora. To begin with, both of the two corpora employ hedging devices heavily and frequently and with regard to the category of hedges, the two disciplines use similar categories, mainly covering lexical hedges including modal auxiliaries, full verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns and non-lexical hedges, attribution, clausal elements and other hedges included. Moreover, as for the frequency, in both of the two corpora lexical hedges are used much more frequently than non-lexical hedges and the categories of modal auxiliaries and full verbs both rank the first and the second place.The discrepancies are mainly concentrated in three aspects: Firstly, the overall hedging devices including lexical hedges and non-lexical hedges are much more in the MAP corpus than those in the LAP corpus. Secondly, the two corpora have their own preferred category. For instance, in addition to modal auxiliaries and full verbs, the LAP corpus tends to use more adverbs while the MAP corpus prefers more adjectives. Thirdly, with regard to the same subcategory, there still exist some differences. For example, among all the modal auxiliaries can is used most frequently in the LAP corpus while may in the MAP corpus.The main interpretations for the discrepancies lie in the general nature of the two disciplines. Literature belongs to soft science and literary academic papers are common literary writing style while Medicine belongs to nature science and medical academic papers are scientific writing style. Furthermore, different social statuses and cultural backgrounds can also influence the usage of hedges.Finally, this thesis provides some implications and suggestions for the teaching and writing of English academic papers with the purpose of enhancing students'awareness of hedges and improving their proficiency in academic writing.