Page 327 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

12 Hedging in Academic Text in English
OVERVIEW
• The role and importance of hedges in academic text
• Helping learners expand their hedging repertoire
• Various types of hedges such as frequency adverbs, possibility
hedges, modal verbs, and adjective/adverb hedges • Developing stock vocabulary and hedges
• Overstatements and learning to avoid them
In the past several decades, much research has been devoted to hedging in academic prose, among other types of discourse (e.g., Channell, 1994; Hinkel, 1997b; Holmes, 1984; Huebler, 1983; Hyland, 1998; Kay, 1997; Pagano, 1994). Analyses of large English-language corpora continue to un- derscore the importance and prevalence of various types of hedging devices in academic prose (Biber, 1988; Biber et al., 1999; Hoye, 1997).
According to Hyland (1998), the purpose of hedging is to reduce the writer's commitment to the truthfulness of a statement. In addition, hedg- ing represents the use of linguistic devices to show hesitation or uncertainty, display politeness and indirectness, and defer to the reader's point of view (Hinkel, 1996a, 1997b). In academic prose, hedging has numerous social and rhetorical purposes, and it can take many linguistic forms, including adverbs, adjectives, modal and mental/emotive verbs, and conjunctions. In linguistic research, various definitions and classifications of hedging de- vices have been constructed to account for their complex and frequently culturally bound contextual uses.
In Anglo-American formal written text, hedges are used extensivelywith the general goal of projecting "honesty, modesty, proper caution," and di- plomacy (Swales, 1990a, p. 174).
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