A Contrastive Study Of Hedging In English And Chinese Scholars’ Academic Articles

Academic writing used to be regarded as objective genre without personal affections, designed to disguise the author and deal directly with the facts. However, it is generally recognized that writers of academic writing also need to demonstrate their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly in order to meet discourse community expectations and gain acceptance for their statements. The device employed to realize the less commitment to their propositions and statements is hedging.Although there are a large number of researches on hedges, the research of hedges in academic writing is still in its preliminary period. Besides, there is scarce any comparative study of the research of hedges in academic writing in one specific discipline. In order to find out the differences and similarities of hedging by Chinese scholars and English speakers and obtain pedagogical implications through comparison between Chinese scholars and native speakers, the present study is carried out.This study is a contrastive study based on corpus and Hyland’s definition and Varttala’s classification are adopted as theoretical framework. The data is processed and analyzed both by software and by hand. The main findings are as follows:Firstly, generally speaking, there is significant difference in the use of lexical hedges between Chinese scholars and native speakers.Secondly, when the five types of lexical hedges are concerned, Chinese scholars differ significantly from native speakers only in modal verbs and full verbs. There is no significance in the use of epistemic adjectives, epistemic adverbs and epistemic nouns.Thirdly, when each subtype of lexical hedges are concerned, among the eight modal auxiliaries, only would is used as hedges in more situations by native speakers than Chinese scholars. Among the three types of full verbs used as hedges, native speakers employ more tentative linking verbs and tentative cognition verbs than Chinese scholars. Among the four types of epistemic adverbs, native scholars use probability adverbs, indefinite degree adverbs and approximative adverbs more frequently as hedging devices. However, among the three types of epistemic nouns, it is found that native speakers use less nonfactive assertive nouns than Chinese scholars. As to the epistemic adjectives, Chinese scholars are found doing quite well. No matter from the perspective of the whole type or from the perspective of the four subtypes, there is no significant difference in the usage between native speakers and Chinese scholars.