Lexical realizations of hedging: A cross-disciplinary study of research article abstracts by Russian authors

Abstract

Currently, when the English language has established itself as a lingua franca in academic settings, it is relevant to investigate rhetorical strategies in texts produced by L2 writers who use English in their academic prose. This paper explores lexical patterns of hedging in Englishmedium research article abstracts written by L2 (Russian) writers from two fields representing hard sciences and humanities — engineering and linguistics. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the lexical realizations of hedging as a metadiscourse strategy used to present research results and enter into a dialogue with the reader. The corpus comprises 312 engineering and linguistics research article abstracts taken equally from six Russian linguistic and engineering journals. In order to investigate hedging devices and their lexical categories, this study adopted the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results of the quantitative analysis show that there are many differences in the distribution of lexical patterns of hedging in the two sub-corpora. In the engineering abstracts, hedging was most frequently realized through modal auxiliaries and adverbs of frequency. In the linguistics subcorpus, probability nouns and reporting verbs were among the most frequent lexical patterns of hedging. In the linguistics abstracts, hedging was realized through a greater variety of lexical categories. This suggests that lexical realizations of hedging seem to be influenced by the discipline rather than generic conventions.