Hedges and boosters in medical and engineering research articles: A comparative corpus-based study

This study aimed to compare the use of hedges and boosters in medical sciences and engineering research articles. To fulfil this objective, the researcher provided 30 medical and 30 engineering research articles to identify the hedging and boosting devices used in them. The research articles were analysed according to lexical devices classification, focusing on hedges and boosters. The AntConc concordance software was used to identify the instances of hedges and boosters in both disciplines. Frequency, percentage and the Chi-square test were run to analyse the data. The results indicated that the difference between the frequency of hedges and boosters in medical sciences and engineering research articles was significant and meaningful. Moreover, the outcomes indicated that the most frequent hedges were epistemic modality verbs, quantifiers and nouns and the most frequent boosters were nouns, lexical verbs, modal verbs and adjectives. These discoveries of this paper may have some implications for the teaching of academic writing, especially to EFL learners. Keywords: Boosters, engineering research articles, hedges, medical research articles