hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles.pdf

Hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles: A comparative study of English- and Chinese-medium journals Guangwei Hu *, Feng Cao Department of English Language and Literature, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 NanyangWalk, Singapore 637616, Singapore 1. Introduction This study examines the use of hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers in the genre of the academic article abstract from a comparative perspective. According to an often-quoted definition, metadiscourse consists of ‘‘the self- reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community’’ (Hyland, 2005a:37). As a repertoire of rhetorical resources deployed to manage the relations among the writer, the evolving text and the intended reader, metadiscourse has attracted increasing research attention in the past decade, especially from researchers of scientific and scholarlywriting (e.g., Abdi, 2002; Abdi et al., 2010; A?del, 2006; Dahl, 2004; Gillaerts and Van de Velde, 2010; Hyland, 2005a,b; Hyland and Tse, 2004; Lindeberg, 2004; Peterlin, 2005). This focus on metadiscourse has been motivated by the growing recognition that academic writers do not simply report their findings in an objective or impersonal way, but actively draw from a range of rhetorical strategies rooted in their own disciplines and socio-cultural milieus to organize arguments, provide evidence, and evaluate claims to convince their readers (Abdi et al., 2010; Bazerman, 1988; Crismore et al., 1993; Flowerdew, 1997; Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2795–2809 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 30 June 2010 Received in revised form 27 January 2011 Accepted 15 April 2011 Available online 26 May 2011 Keywords: Academic writing Article abstract Booster Epistemological belief Hedge Metadiscourse Rhetorical convention A B S T R A C T Hedges an