The Use Of Hedge In English Economic And Management Research Articles By Chinese And NSE Scholars

Vagueness, as a natural and intrinsic characteristic of human language, has continuously drawn linguistic attention. Hedge which is identified as one of the most important branches of vagueness plays an indispensable role in academic writings, functioning as an effective tool in cushioning the danger of being too exact and increase accuracy so as to create a harmonious "writer-reader-content" academic environment.With the help of analysis softwares SPSS and My finder, as well as scrutiny, this paper tries to look into hedges by contrastively analyzing the use of hedges in two self-built corpora comprising100English Economic and Management Articles, of which50are written by Chinese authors and another50by English native authors. Mainly based on Hyland’s model, the research makes both quantitative and qualitative contrastive analysis concerning occurrence, distribution, frequency of lexical hedges, and the findings suggest that both similarities and differences exist between CAC and NAC. As for the similarities, lexical hedges occur frequently in both two corpora, as can be reflected in the figure286.78per10000words in CAC and306.12per10000words in NAC, from which differences may also be reflected with higher frequency of hedges used in NAC. Differences can also be presented in the use of lexical hedges concerning hedging items and devices under each subcategory in two corpora, proving the significance of hedges in academic writings. Hence, the research may offer some hints to improve pedagogics of English and further study.