A Cross-disciplinary Study of Hedging Expressions in English Articles of Iranian Writers

Reza Rezvani, Mohammad Javadi

Abstract


Research on the use of hedging strategies as one of the key issues of rhetorical organization of academic texts has gained growing attention during the past few decades. The present study aimed to explore the frequency and form of hedging expressions in the abstracts of Iranian writers’ English research articles where findings and claims were more explicitly projected. To this end, a random sample of 200 abstracts (50 each) was drawn equally from the four subfields of chemistry and mathematics, and philosophy and English randomly selected from the two academic fields of Soft Sciences and Hard Sciences respectively as suggested in Biglan’s (1973) typology of academic disciplines. The tally and analysis of the tokens of the hedge expressions indicated that the abstracts from the soft sciences differed from those from the hard sciences in terms of both frequency and form. The results revealed that the writers from the soft sciences tended to employ more hedge expressions than hard sciences writers. More specifically, whereas soft sciences writers utilized more modals, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, their counterparts opted for more conditional expressions. Moreover, epistemic and cognition verbs were found to be the most frequently used hedging expressions in both sciences. This study discusses the research and pedagogical implications of the findings in the context of Iranian academia.

Save to Mendeley


Keywords


hedging expression, research article, discipline, Iranian writer

Full Text:

PDF

References


Adams Smith, D. (1984). Medical discourse: Aspects of author’s comment. English for Specific Purposes, 3, 25-36.

Ayers, G. (1993). An investigation of the short texts accompanying the research articles in the scientific journal nature. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Birmingham. UK.

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Biglan, A. (1973). Relationships between Subject Matter Characteristics and the Structure and Output of University Departments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 57(3), 204-213.

Coats, J. (1987). Epistemic modality and spoken discourse. Transactions of the Philological Society, 85, 100-131.

Crystal, D. (1997). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Durik, A., Britt, A., Reynolds, R., & Story, J. (2008). The effects of hedges in persuasive arguments: A nuanced analysis of language. Journal of Language & Social Psychology, 27, 217-234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927X08317947.

Graetz, N. (1985). Teaching EFL students to extract structural information from abstracts. In J. M. Ulijn & A. K. Pugh (Eds.), Reading for professional purposes. Methods and materials in teaching language (pp. 123–135). Amersfoot: Leuven.

Hanania, E., & Akhtar, K. (1985). Verb form and rhetorical function in science writing: A study of MS theses in biology, chemistry and physics. ESP Journal, 4, 49-58.

Harvey, A., & Horsella, M. (1988). Exploring and exploiting the structure of computational abstracts. The ESPecialist, 9, 229–247.

Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hyland, K. (1994). Hedging in academic writing and EAP textbooks. English for Specific Purposes, 13(3), 239-255.

Hyland, K. (1996). Writing without conviction: Hedging in scientific research articles. Applied Linguistics, 17, 433–454.

Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourses. London: Longman.

Kaplan, R. B. (1987). Cultural thought patterns revisited. In: Connor and Kaplan (Eds.), Writing across languages and cultures: Analysis of L2 text (pp. 9-22). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Lau, H. H. (1999). Hedging expressions as signals of evidence in academic journal discourse. Selected papers from the 8th int’l symposium on English teaching (pp. 431-440). Taipei: Crane.

Lakoff, G. (1972). Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. Chicago Linguistic Society Papers, 8, 183-228.

Melander, B., Swales, J. M., & Friedrickson, K. M. (1997). Journal abstracts from three academic fields in the United States and Sweden. National or disciplinary proclivities? In A. Duszak (Ed.), Intellectual styles and cross-cultural communication (pp. 251–272). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Mirzapour, F., RasekhMahand, M. (2012). Hedges and Boosters in Native and Non-Native Library and Information and Computer Science Research Articles. The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 18 (2), 119-128.

Nasiri, S. (2012a). Utilization of hedging devices by American and Iranian researchers in the field of civil engineering. International Journal of Linguistics, 4 (2), 124-133.

Nasiri, S. (2012b). Academic writing: The role of culture, language and identity in writing for community. International Journal of Learning & Development, 2(3), 1-8.

Salager-Meyer, F. (1990). Discoursal flaws in medical English abstracts: A genre analysis per research- and text-type. Text, 10(4), 365–384.

Samraj, B. (2005). An exploration of a genre set: Research article abstracts and introductions in two disciplines. English for Specific Purposes, 24 (2), 141–156.

Schroder, H., & Zimmer, D. (1995).Hedging research in pragmatics: A bibliographical research guide to hedging. Retrieved August, 14, 2014, p.36. from.http://www.Sw2.euv Frankfurto.de/publikationen/Hedging/Zimmer/Zimmer.html.

Skelton, J. (1988). Care and maintenance of hedges. ELT Journal, 42, 37-43.

Soodmand Afshar, H., & Bagherieh, M. (2014). The Use of Hedging Devices in English and Persian Abstracts of Persian Literature and Civil Engineering MA/MS Theses of Iranian Writers. Social and Behavioral Sciences, 98, 1820–1827.

Stubbs, M. (1986). A matter of prolonged fieldwork: Notes towards a model grammar of English. Applied Linguistics, 7, 1 25.http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/7.1.1

Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: CUP.

Tahririan, M. H., & Shahzamani, M. (2009). Hedging in English and Persian editorials: A contrastive study. Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12 (1), 199-221.

Ulijin, J. M., & Pugh, A. K. (Eds.). (1985). Reading for professional purposes: Methods and material for teaching language. Leuven, Belgium: Acco press.

Vold, E. T., (2006). Epistemic modality markers in research articles: a cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 16(1), 61-87.

Weissberg, R., & Buker, S. (1990). Writing up research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

YavuzKonca, M., & Nasiri, S. (2014). How to Hedge in Psychology discipline? A Cross-National Study. Journal of American Science; 10 (10), 1-5.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.33508/bw.v9i1.2517