A comparative study on hedges in English abstracts of research articles from Chinese and American economic journals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6824027Keywords:
hedge, abstract, pragmatics, academic discourseAbstract
The appropriate use of hedges in academic discourse could make language more objective, improving the credibility of the research article. The abstract section of a research article tends to be a summary of the main content and plays an important role in increasing the frequency of publication, retrieval, reading, and citation. This study examines the use of hedges in economic papers between two corpora: the abstracts from American journals and the abstracts from Chinese journals. Based on Prince et al’s (1982) taxonomy of hedges and the numbers and frequencies of their various types, hedges in the two corpora were identified and quantified. Considerable variations were found in the overall number and frequency of hedges, the types of hedging devices, and the wordings of hedges in the two corpora. Findings were interpreted with respect to Chinese authors’ lack of familiarity with hedges and their first language transfer. In general, the results may have some implications for Chinese economic scholars’ English abstract writing and its related teaching. Some suggestions on the topic and the limitations of this study are also presented at the end of this paper.
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