Hedging as a Marker of Variation in Pakistani Research Dissertations of Sciences and Social Sciences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47067/ramss.v3i3.70Keywords:
Academic Writing, Metadiscourse, Hedges, EpistemicAbstract
Perspicuous organization and persuasion are required in academic writing for creating unity, making claims, sequencing, and eloquence. Hedging is a distinctive aspect of academic writing. Hedging can be employed as a communicative strategy to decrease or enhance the strength of claims (Hyland, 1998). This research study explores the frequencies and grammatical categories of hedges in the research dissertations written by Pakistani authors. The corpus of the study contains 150 research dissertations of sciences and social sciences. The frequencies and forms of hedges are examined by utilizing Varttala’s (1999) classification of Hedges. Lists of hedges have been developed to identify the different categories of hedges. Instances of hedges have been extracted from the corpora with the help of AntConc 3.5.8 (2019) software. The results reveal that the authors from the field of social sciences are more careful and cautious in making their claims as compared to the sciences.
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