A Contrastive Analysis Of Hedges Between Research Articles Of Social Sciences And Physical Sciences

Since the concept of hedges was put forward by Lakoff in semantics in the 1970 s, the study of hedges has extended to many other fields, such as pragmatics, stylistics, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, etc. Due to linguistic features of hedges and the characteristics of academic writing, hedges have become one of the most common strategies in English academic writing. When scholars publish their study findings, they, restricted by certain conditions, usually favor hedges to avoid assertion. This language phenomenon has attracted much attention from linguistic scholars. This paper will contrastively analyze the frequency of hedging strategies on the basis of Martin(2008)’s classifications of hedging strategies and explore the distribution of hedging strategies based on Swales’ IMRD moves. The paper aims to explore the frequencies and distribution of hedging strategies in social sciences research articles and physical sciences research articles, and examine whether there are differences between two fields. And based on the results of the statistical analysis, the potential reasons for the differences will be explored.In this study, two corpuses, social sciences research articles corpus and physical sciences research articles corpus, have been constructed. Social sciences research articles corpus is of 30 research articles of social sciences, which involves three disciplines: linguistics, economics and psychology, 209310 words in total. Physical sciences research articles corpus is of 30 research articles of physical sciences, which involves three disciplines: computer sciences, engineering and physics, 219,095 words in total.Firstly, hedging strategies in the two corpuses were identified and manually counted; and then independent samples t-test was employed to find out whether there were significant differences in the frequencies of hedging strategies in each move of research articles between social sciences and physical sciences.The results of this study indicated that Discussion move was the most hedged, followed by Introduction move in social sciences research articles. Introduction move was the most hedged among the four moves, followed by Discussion move in physical sciences research articles. The frequencies of hedging strategies in Methods move and Results move are obviously lower than Introduction and Discussion moves both in social sciences research articles and physical sciences research articles. All these differences in using hedging strategies among the four moves may owe to different contents and functions of each move.The three hedging strategies all possessed high frequencies in Introduction moves both in social sciences research articles and in physical sciences research articles. No significant differences were found in the frequencies of three hedging strategies under the assistance of independent sample t-test of SPSS between the two corpuses. In Methods move, the frequencies of strategy of indetermination and strategy of depersonalization in social sciences research articles were much higher than those in physical sciences research articles, and the differences were significant; however, there were no significant differences in using strategy of subjectivisation in social sciences research articles and physical sciences research articles. In Results move, the three hedging strategies in social sciences research articles were much more frequently used than those in physical sciences research articles, and the differences were significant. In Discussion move, the frequencies of strategy of indetermination and strategy of depersonalization in social sciences research articles were higher than those in physical sciences research articles, and the differences are significant between these two fields; the frequencies of strategy of subjectivisation were much low in the both two fields, and there were no significant differences in using this hedging strategy.Through the study on hedging strategy in these two fields, on one hand, the author hopes to help writers of academic writing properly use hedges; and on the other hand, the study may help readers understand hedges and accurately infer the intention of writers of academic writing. What’s more, the study can provide some help for better academic paper writings.