| Hedging in research articles(RAs) is an important meta-discourse strategy to mark the writer’s attitude towards his/her proposition and audience. Many researchers have studied the overall frequency and distribution of hedging in RAs and in different sections of RAs. The rhetoric in Conclusion is rarely studied while it is pragmatically significant: it can show writer’s honesty and protect his/her negative face, that is to show respect to the scholars in the academic community. Besides, considering hedge’s disciplinary specialty in academic writing(Butler, 1990; Varttala, 2001), the present study carries out a cross-disciplinary study on hedging in RA Conclusions between biology(natural science) and management(social science). Based on Varttala’s(2001) hedging definition and classification, this study is intended to make a comparative study of hedging in English managerial and biological RA Conclusions. The aim of this study is to summarize the similarities and differences of hedging in the two disciplines and to offer their disciplinary interpretation. Besides, it is hoped that this research will point out the function and importance of hedging in Conclusions.Based on a pilot study, two corpora of RA Conclusions are established, BC(conclusions of biological RAs) corpus and MC(conclusions of managerial RAs) corpus, both of which are composed of two journals, 15 RA Conclusions from each journal. The study shows both of the two corpora are frequently hedged by various hedging devices(both over 40 incidences per thousand words) and the Conclusion is one of the most heavily hedged sections in RAs. Besides, with the help of Chi-square test, the results show that Conclusions of biological RAs are more hedged than those of managerial ones. There are also marked differences between specific types of hedges: there are more modal auxiliaries, adverbs, adjectives and clause elements in BC corpus than in MC corpus and more nouns in MC corpus than in BC corpus. And their sub-types are also explored with some great differences, for example, under the category of verbs, we found BC corpus uses more nonfactive reporting verbs and less tentative linking verbs than MC. The high frequency of hedging in the corpora and their functions are discussed and concluded.The present study has some implications for instructing scholars and students in biology and management areas in reading and writing of RAs. Besides, it can also serve as references for teachers in teaching and researching of the writing of Conclusions. |
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