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Hedging and boosting in abstracts of academic articles : a comparative study of Chinese and international journals of applied linguistics
Author
Cao, Feng
Supervisor
Hu, Guangwei
Abstract
As a promotional part-genre, the abstract of the academic article has gained increasing attention in applied linguistics. Cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic studies on abstracts show that some important rhetorical differences exist between abstracts for academic articles in different disciplines and written in different languages. Whereas most previous studies in this regard tend to focus on the discourse patterns of this part-genre, relatively little research has been done on the metadiscourse used in the academic article abstracts. The present study attempts to fill this gap by making a comparative study of the metadiscourse markers of hedges and boosters as used in English and Chinese academic article abstracts in the field of applied linguistics.
The study is based on a total of 597 abstracts from four Chinese-medium and four English-medium leading journals in applied linguistics. Three corpora were established according to the language-journal combination and article types: EA-EJ corpus (the English abstracts written by international applied linguists in English-medium journals), CA-CJ corpus (the Chinese abstracts written by Chinese applied linguists in Chinese-medium journals), and the EA-CJ corpus (the English abstracts written by the same Chinese applied linguists in Chinese-medium journals). Each corpus comprises both empirical and non-empirical article abstracts. A taxonomy based on Hyland’s (2005b) metadiscourse framework was developed for data coding.
The quantitative and qualitative results showed that there were significant differences in the use of hedges and boosters between the Chinese and the international applied linguists and between the abstracts for empirical and non-empirical academic articles. Three patterns were found to be particularly prominent as a result of the joint effects of hedges and boosters. That is, (1) the international applied linguists in the EA-EJ corpus tended to adopt more tentative writers’ stance in abstracts; (2) the Chinese applied linguists in both CA-CJ corpus and EA-CJ corpus tended to be more committed and authoritative towards their knowledge-claims; (3) the writer’s stance in the non-empirical academic article abstracts was inclined to be more tentative than that in the empirical ones. It was argued that a number of factors might account for these findings: the different rhetorical conventions in academic writing, the limited English proficiency on the part of the Chinese applied linguists, the prevalence of scientism in Chinese academic discourse, and the different nature of the different types of articles.
The findings from the present study have some important theoretical and pedagogical implications regarding the use of hedges and boosters in academic writing, in particular for those Chinese applied linguists who may wish to publish in international English-medium journals of applied linguistics.
The study is based on a total of 597 abstracts from four Chinese-medium and four English-medium leading journals in applied linguistics. Three corpora were established according to the language-journal combination and article types: EA-EJ corpus (the English abstracts written by international applied linguists in English-medium journals), CA-CJ corpus (the Chinese abstracts written by Chinese applied linguists in Chinese-medium journals), and the EA-CJ corpus (the English abstracts written by the same Chinese applied linguists in Chinese-medium journals). Each corpus comprises both empirical and non-empirical article abstracts. A taxonomy based on Hyland’s (2005b) metadiscourse framework was developed for data coding.
The quantitative and qualitative results showed that there were significant differences in the use of hedges and boosters between the Chinese and the international applied linguists and between the abstracts for empirical and non-empirical academic articles. Three patterns were found to be particularly prominent as a result of the joint effects of hedges and boosters. That is, (1) the international applied linguists in the EA-EJ corpus tended to adopt more tentative writers’ stance in abstracts; (2) the Chinese applied linguists in both CA-CJ corpus and EA-CJ corpus tended to be more committed and authoritative towards their knowledge-claims; (3) the writer’s stance in the non-empirical academic article abstracts was inclined to be more tentative than that in the empirical ones. It was argued that a number of factors might account for these findings: the different rhetorical conventions in academic writing, the limited English proficiency on the part of the Chinese applied linguists, the prevalence of scientism in Chinese academic discourse, and the different nature of the different types of articles.
The findings from the present study have some important theoretical and pedagogical implications regarding the use of hedges and boosters in academic writing, in particular for those Chinese applied linguists who may wish to publish in international English-medium journals of applied linguistics.
Date Issued
2009
Call Number
P302.18 Cao
Date Submitted
2009