Abstract
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
Highlights
Hedges and boosters are communicative strategies for expanding or decreasing the power of explanations
This study examined hedging in non-Western European authors like Iranian authors to see if there are any differences in using hedges and boosters by these authors
This study examines hedging and boosting in two different disciplines (i.e., Medical Sciences and Engineering) to see if there are any differences in using hedges and boosters in these two areas. 1.2
Summary
Hedges and boosters are communicative strategies for expanding or decreasing the power of explanations. Hedges and boosters attract regard for the way that statements do not convey thoughts, yet the writer’s mentality to them and to readers. ‘Hedging’ is a multi-objective etymological gadget, the learning of which can push a specialist to fittingly express his logical cases. There are various definitions for ‘hedging’ and various creators have determined various scientific categorisations and capacities for hedge words. For Salagar-Meyer (2011), exploring hedge words is not restricted to logical and scholarly composition (Abedi, Keshmirshekan, & Namaziandost, 2019; Adams-Smith, 1984; Myers, 1989). Others have gone far to examine supporting all in all language writings and contrastive talk (Clyne, 1991; Skelton, 1988; Namaziandost, Nasri, & Keshmirshekan, 2019)
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