A Contrastive Study On Hedges In English And Chinese Scientific Discourses

Based on the classification of hedges proposed by Xu Jing(许静,2017),this study compared and analyzed hedges in English and Chinese scientific discourses.This study strove to answer the following two main questions:(1)Is there any quantitative difference in the use of hedges between English and Chinese scientific discourses?(2)Is there any difference in the distributional pattern of hedges between English and Chinese scientific discourses?In order to answer the above questions,this research mainly adopted quantitative contrastive method.Total 60 scientific articles in the field of steel structure engineering published in the EI(The Engineering Index),SCI(Science Citation Index)and CSCD(Chinese Science Citation Database)journals were selected.English scientific discourse corpus and Chinese scientific discourse corpus were then built.Each corpus was further divided into four sub-corpora according to the general structure of the article in order to make a detailed study.On the basis of statistics,the independent samples t-test was used to analyze the quantitative differences of hedges between English and Chinese scientific discourses.The comprehensive distributional pattern and the sectional distributional pattern of hedges were also analyzed from the dimensions of distributional composition and distributional evenness.The results showed significant quantitative differences in the use of hedges between English and Chinese scientific discourses.Hedges were more frequently used in Chinese scientific discourse than in English scientific discourse,but there was no significant difference in the use of shields between them.The distributional patterns of hedges between English and Chinese scientific discourses showed similarities and differences.In terms of the comprehensive distributional pattern,in both the English and Chinese scientific discourses,generally the proportion of approximators was larger than shields,but the distribution in different sections would have some variations.In terms of the sectional distributional pattern,in both the English and Chinese scientific discourses,the most heavily hedged section was the results and discussion and the least hedged section was the conclusion,but the ranking trend ofthe proportions of hedges in the methodology and the introduction were different.Generally,hedges in English scientific discourse were more balanced distributed than hedges in the Chinese scientific discourse in terms of the comprehensive distribution and the sectional distribution.This study made a relatively comprehensive and systematic contrastive analysis on hedges in English and Chinese.It can provide some linguistic and pragmatic references for the writers to use hedges appropriately and flexibly in scientific discourse writing and help readers understand the meaning of hedges properly.Besides,this study can also provide Chinese scholars or second language learners with foreign scholars’ skills and strategies in the use of hedges,which has certain practical value for writing teaching.