Abstract
An important area of academic English competence, the use of hedges in various regional varieties of English, has been the subject of numerous cross-cultural studies worldwide. However, hedging in the Russian variety of English as an academic lingua franca remains largely under-researched. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study of lexical hedges in English abstracts of 200 Russian research articles published over the past few years in the leading national Journals of Economics. The data obtained in this research are compared to the findings of an earlier similarly designed study of British and American abstracts, shedding light on the peculiarities of lexical hedging use by Russian authors. Quantitative corpus linguistics methods are used, notably statistical analysis of corpus frequency data based on Dunning's log-likelihood test. Our analysis shows that although Russian economics research writers employ quite a wide range of lexical hedging devices – largely over 70% – coinciding with those used by native English writers, they use most categories of lexical hedges (modal verbs, adverbials, quantifiers and full verbs) less frequently while employing hedging nouns more frequently than their British and American counterparts. The findings can be useful for further research into hedging in the abstracts of scientific articles on other disciplines as well as for teaching English research abstract writing to Russian speakers.
Highlights
An important area of academic English competence, the use of hedges in various regional varieties of English, has been the subject of numerous cross-cultural studies worldwide
This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study of lexical hedges in English abstracts of 200 Russian research articles published over the past few years in the leading national economics journals
Our analysis shows that although Russian economics research writers employ quite a wide range of lexical hedging deviсes largely – over 70% – coinciding with those used by native English writers, they use most categories of lexical hedges (modal verbs, adverbials, quantifiers and full verbs) less frequently while employing hedging nouns more frequently than their British and American counterparts
Summary
Для проведения исследования был создан корпус из 200 англоязычных аннотаций статей по экономике, опубликованных в 2014–2017 гг. в пяти ведущих отечественных научных экономических журналах: «Вестнике Московского университета. Для проведения исследования был создан корпус из 200 англоязычных аннотаций статей по экономике, опубликованных в 2014–2017 гг. В пяти ведущих отечественных научных экономических журналах: «Вестнике Московского университета. Обработка корпуса проводилась в соответствии с процедурой, которая применялась в отношении британских и американских аннотаций в предшествующей работе [Миколайчик, 2019]. Поскольку между британским и американским подкорпусами в предшествующем исследовании [Миколайчик, 2019] статистически значимых различий обнаружено не было, в настоящей работе российский корпус сопоставлялся с объединенным англоамериканским корпусом из 200 аннотаций общим объемом 21 941 словоупотребление. Статистическая значимость различий в частотности средств хеджирования между корпусами определялась с помощью теста отношения правдоподобия G2 Даннинга [Dunning, 1993], с учетом ограничений в отношении минимальных значений математического ожидания, оговоренных в работе П. При проведении исследования использовались статистические инструменты, представленные на сайте Ланкастерского университета (URL: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/sigtest/#guidance)
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