Gender Differences in the Use of Hedges And First Person Pronouns in Research Articles of Applied Linguistics and Chemistry

Abstract

Differences in the way that males and females use language have been of interest in the study of discourse. This study is an attempt to examine whether men and women differ with respect to the use of hedges and first person pronouns in research articles of two disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Chemistry. Based on a corpus of sixty research articles, the overall categorical distribution of hedging devices and first person pronouns were calculated in research articles. The results indicate that hedges and first person plural pronouns are used in Applied Linguistics articles more frequently than Chemistry articles. Moreover, females use hedges more than males in both disciplines but males use first person plural pronoun more than females in both disciplines. These findings may have some implications for the teaching of academic writing to EFL students.