Hedges in Chinese Academic texts: How Authors Qualify Their Argument
| Autor: | Yu-Wen, Lo, 羅予彣 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 98 Hedges in academic texts enable authors to express uncertainty and indicate the authors’ cautiousness and responsibility for degrees of reliability of their claims. Meanwhile, hedges also decrease their responsibility for the truth of the claims to prevent negation. Although there are some studies about Chinese spoken hedges, hedges in academic texts do not draw attention from the research community. Therefore, this study aims to investigate Chinese writers’ use of hedges in Chinese academic research papers. We explore the linguistic realizations of hedges in Chinese academic texts and the similarities and differences of hedges used among three different academic fields and between Chinese academic texts and spoken discourse. The three academic fields selected are biology, business, and history & literature, representing natural science, social science, and pure humanity. Our corpus comprises 30 research papers from three well-known Chinese academic journals published from 2000 to 2008 in each of the three fields. Our results showed that academic writers rely greatly on lexical hedges, accounting for nearly 90% of all hedging devices, to qualify their argument. Among all grammatical categories, adverbs occur most frequently, followed by auxiliaries and verbs while the auxiliaries keneng 可能 ‘may’, ying(gai) 應(該) ‘should’, and ke(yi) 可(以) ‘can’ are the most frequently used hedges. Disciplinary difference in our corpus is observed in the types of hedges used instead of the frequency of hedges. We found that biology writers generally rely on a much more restricted set of hedges whereas writers of history & literature make use of the greatest variety of hedges. In biology, writers frequently hedge the precision of numerical expressions because their studies frequently involve measurement in the experimental process. They also often hedge the testability of their studies to avoid make speculation without any experimental evidence. In business, the disciplinary convention requires that writers make predictions or hypotheses based on previous researches and test whether their findings is in accordance with the hypotheses. As a result, they frequently qualify their proposed predictions and research suggestions. Although previous studies do not report distinction of the use of hedges between social science and pure humanities, we do observe differences in the types of hedges used between history & literature and business. Since claims in history & literature are mostly based on the authors’ interpretation of the available literature, writers of history & literature most frequently use hedges indicting subjective attitude and personal reference to express their subjective judgment of the information. The comparison between hedges in Chinese academic texts and spoken discourse suggests that writers of history & literature have styles that are closer to the spoken register. In our corpus, writers of history & literature use more sensory verbs and nouns, stance adverbs, and question words, which are typically observed in spoken discourse. Therefore, more studies in pure humanity are required if we want to have a complete understanding of disciplinary difference in the use of hedges. Although hedges can be used to indicate language users’ uncertainty in both academic and spoken discourses, the motivations for speakers and academic writers to use the same hedging devices may not be the same. In spoken language, politeness may play a more influential role in the use of hedges due to the interpersonal nature of conversation whereas in academic texts, avoiding negation and presenting statements with appropriate degree of certainty are more important. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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