Hedging in the Discussion Sections of Research Articles in Applied Linguistics

Abstract

The present study investigates hedge use in academic discourse of the applied linguistics (AL) field by describing the overall and move-specific distributions of hedges in the discussion section of RAs. With the discussions of 20 articles sampled from six leading journals in AL, the located hedging devices were classified into five categories: modal auxiliaries, lexical verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Combining the use of a concordancer (Antconc 3.1) and manual contextual analysis (to ensure both forms and functions as hedges), the frequencies and the category distributions of the overall and move-specific hedges were analyzed. Three major moves (stating various communicative functions) in the discussions proposed by Swales and Feak (2004)-consolidating the research space, indicating the limitations of the study, and recommendations for future research-were adopted as the focus for the move-specific analysis. The results shows that modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs were the most frequently used classes, and hedging devices were often employed as clusters in phrasal patterns. Further, the move of recommendations for future research was recognized as the most heavily hedged section. This implied that when the RA authors suggest the directions for future studies, they hedge their expressions most.