Mirzaei، Mina

A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Disciplinary Study of Lexical Verbs Serving as Epistemic Hedges in English and Persian Discussion Sections of Research Articles

AbstractHedging has emerged in the literature in academic writing as an important mechanism bywhich academic writers mitigate the force of their claims Hyland 1996 Despite itssignificant status in academic society however interpreting and using hedges appropriatelyhave repeatedly been reported to be difficult for learners especially in academic writingwhere EFL writers tend to unfold a collection of facts in a direct and impersonal manner Bloor Bloor 1991 Dudley Evans 1991 Hyland 2000a Kamimura Oi 2006 Oh 2007 Skelton 1988 The present study was motivated to examine the distribution of formsand functions of hedging in discussion section of academic research articles RAs in twolanguages English and Persian and three disciplines engineering natural sciences andsocial sciences and thus aims to provide suggestions for ways to guide academic writerstoward the skillful use of hedging The data used for research comprised 150 English articlesand 150 Persian articles From each discipline 50 articles were chosen After collecting thediscussion parts of the articles they were loaded into AntConc 3 4 4 the instrument used inthis study to identify lexical verbs in English and Persian After determining the hedges outof the identified verbs they were classified into four verb categories based on Hyland s 1998 classification and were analyzed in terms of both frequency and functions Thefunctional framework chosen for this study was organized around three broad functionalcategories based on Hyland s functional taxonomy of hedges in academic writing 1998 accuracy oriented writer oriented and reader oriented Findings showed that the English RAs were 61 more hedged than Farsi RAs Moreover the distribution of hedging devices was shown to be different across disciplines The resultsalso showed that the English and Farsi RAs contained more writer oriented hedges andfewer reader oriented hedges Accuracy oriented hedges were the second frequent functionacross English and Farsi The findings suggest that hedges are used differently acrosslanguages and disciplines Iranian writers used less hedges than English writers which couldbe due to their unfamiliarity with the concept of hedging and its use Also both English andIranian writers used writer oriented hedges which suggests that they both prefer to distancethemselves from the preposition and protect themselves from unwanted challenges Moreover the analysis of hedging in three disciplines revealed that the use of hedgesdepended much on the nature of data in each discipline Keywords hedges lexical verbs metadiscourse markers epistemic modality discipline discussion sections vi