Scrutinizing the use of hedges
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Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Hedges are linguistic devices in academic writing that soften claims and play a significant role in expressing uncertainty. Accordingly, the present study aims to analyse the use of hedges in the abstract section. To achieve this end, a contextual analysis of these devices is carried out on a corpus which consists of 16 abstract sections (08 for Biology and 08 for Social Humanities) drawn from master dissertations. Then the frequencies of the various types of hedges devices across the corpus were recorded using AntConc, a robust computational toolkit. After gathering the data, the two corpora were classified according to Hyland (1996)’s taxonomy. To determine the significance of the results obtained, a Mann -Whitney U test is run by means of SPSS. The interpretation of the results highlights a significant differences in the use of hedging devices between Social Humanities and Biology abstracts particularly in the areas of modal verbs and adverbs which indicates the rejection of the null hypothesis. This observation indicates that Humans sciences emphasize nuanced argumentation and interpretations, while Biology prioritizes factual precision and data-driven conclusions. On the basis of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are offered and suggestions for further research are proposed.