A Corpus-based Study On Hedges In English Academic Abstracts Written By Chinese And Native Enlgish Scholars

Hedges, which belong to vague language, are often used as an effective strategy to convey epistemic modality, to express the writer's attitudes toward both statements and readers, and to leave room for discussion between writers and readers. They play a significant role in English academic writing. Fruitful achievements have been made by over 30 years'development of the study of hedges. Generally speaking, hedges can be classified into two kinds—lexical and non-lexical hedges. This paper concentrates on lexical hedges owing to its 85% account of an article. Since vague language was built up as a discipline, hedges have been studied from various perspectives by foreign researchers. However, many domestic researches on hedges have been carried out only from the perspective of semantics or pragmatics, while there are few empirical studies on lexical hedges in abstracts at home. Therefore, on the basis of two self-compiled academic corpus, the corpus of Chinese Speak English as Foreign Language (CEFL) and the corpus of Native English Speakers (NES), this paper aims to make an empirical and descriptive study of the frequencies, categories and distribution of hedges by CEFL learners and native English speakers in the abstract sections. Besides, the author attempts to adopt Hyland's definitions (1998b) and integrate Hyland's (1998b) and Varttala's (2001) taxonomy of hedges to form the criteria of identification of lexical hedges of each type in both corpora. The present paper aims to provide with necessary evidence for empirical study of vague language by analyzing the lexical hedges.With the assistance of SPSS 15.0 and Antconc 3.2.0, we calculate the incidences and study the distributions of lexical hedging items in both corpora. After analyzing the research data, the present study comes to the final conclusions in the following:(1) In general, the overall frequency of lexical hedges used by both native writers and Chinese EFL writers is similar; (2) As to the types of lexical hedges, both native and non-native writers tend to use more strong modal auxiliaries and adverbs in contrast to other categories like nouns and epistemic verbs; (3) In terms of differences, there does exist significant deviance in the use of adjectives, either in each category or in the total numbers. More specifically, Chinese EFL writers show a striking favor in using adjectives in abstract writing; (4) With regard to epistemic verbs, both native and Chinese EFL writers rarely use this type of verbs in abstracts, which implies that both groups tend to have difficulties in making claims by employing epistemic verbs. All these phenomena revealed in the present study may be caused by the complexity of hedges, L1 transfer, Chinese learners' inadequate knowledge, differences in thoughts, cultures, writing styles and so on. Therefore, the author gives some suggestions on the teaching of hedges with the purpose of improving Chinese learners'English levels by raising their attention on hedges.