Abstract
The paper analyses the versatile usage of hedges in medical academic texts and compares the (sub)genre peculiarities of the scientific research articles (RA) and science popularization articles (PRA). While comparing the two subgenres, the generalized three factors of strategies and functions influencing hedging usage were discriminated, i.e., the expectations of the discourse community, intentions, and shared background knowledge. The comparative analysis of RA and PRA aims at investigating the use of the multifunctional hedging device, and at the end the corpus of nearly 90 000 words and 20 articles has been comprised as a research database. A normative use of hedges in academic texts is treated as appropriate nowadays. The research focuses on the analysis of hedging strategies and functions. It stretched the borders of one function and analyses hedging as a pragmatic, semantic, social, and cognitive phenomenon in the field of epistemic modality. The hedge is viewed from the semantic, pragmatic, cognitive, and social perspectives. This article reviews the role and legitimacy of hedging producing deliberate elusiveness in scientific texts, interprets the cases of hedge uses, infers their functions and meaning. It as well discusses the vector of movement direction from the “author-centred rhetoric” to the “object-centred rhetoric” and vice versa. Hedging is interpreted in the frame of epistemic modality.
Highlights
The study delineates the genre peculiarities, analyses the hedging strategies and functions in perspective of the genres’ context
As the meaning and pragmatic functions comprise various areas of study, and theorists have difficulties to make a clear distinction between the semantics and pragmatics in it, they are categorized as semantic or pragmatic (Leech 1983; Frazer 2010)
Some scholars have proposed a scheme of meaning consisting of two elements, which are semantics and pragmatics
Summary
The study delineates the genre peculiarities, analyses the hedging strategies and functions in perspective of the genres’ context. The definition of hedging, subscribing to Hyland’s (2000) opinion, by all means should include a social aspect It makes linguistic behaviour socially more acceptable, according to the social norms of the academic community. Meyers (1989: 13) maintains that hedges reflect the relations between the writer and the reader, rather than the degree of probability of the statement He as well states (Namsaraev 1997) that the frequency hedging depends on such social factors as writer’s position in the scientific community, the readership, the writer’s personality influencing how sure or unsure he/she feels about the taken position in the study field
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