Text Linguistics

WRITING WITHOUT CONVICTION? HEDGING IN SCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLES

Hedging is the expression of tentativeness and possibility and it is central to academic writing where the need to present unproven prepositions with caution and precision is essential.

It is a significant communicative resource for academics. Hedges are treated as a form of metadiscourse and as a means of achieving distance between a speaker and what is said.

They confirm the individual professional persona and represent a critical element in the rhetorical means of gaining acceptance of claims. They allow writers to anticipate possible opposition to claims by expressing statements with precision and caution. They have a clear pragmatic importance as a discoursal resource for expressing uncertainty, scepticism, and open-mindedness about one’s prepositions. In science, hedges play a critical role in gaining ratification for claims from a powerful peer group by allowing writers to present statements with appropriate accuracy, caution and humility.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF SCIENTIFIC STATEMENTS

Knowledge is influenced by the basic elements of the communication process: writer, audience, language and reality. This is because transforming claims into knowledge requires reader acceptance and therefore linguistic and rhetorical means of persuasion.

In introducing claims, writers rely on evidential support from statements previously confirmed by discourse community as truth about the world. Every other statement, by which the writer asserts the content to be true as far as he or she knows, is a hedged or non-factive statement. Where there is uncertainty about the evidential status of the assumptions between data and hypotheses, claims require varying degrees of hedging.

HEDGING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ARTICLES

A research paper extends understandings of phenomena that seem to be worthy of study and also helps support or establish the personal reputation of the writer; a writer wants the message to be understood (an illocutionary effect) and to be accepted (a hoped for perlocutionary effect).

There is always at least one plausible interpretation of a data. Readers may therefore be persuaded to judge a claim acceptable or may decide to reject it. This view distinguishes comprehension from interpretation: while lexical and syntactic forms determine text meanings, interpretation is unconstrained and subject to knowledge effects which depend on higher-level reasoning skills. The scientific writer can only guide the reader to a particular interpretation though the use of formal meanings but external factors (prior knowledge) affect interpretation. All statements require ratification and because readers are guarantors of the negatability of claims, this gives them an active and constitutive role in how writers construct them.

Mitigation is central to academic writing as hedging signals the writer’s anticipation of the opposition to a preposition.

Two types of opposition: - content oriented-> claims have to correspond with what is believed to be true in the world. Hedges concern a statement’s adequacy conditions: the relationship between a proposition and a representation of reality. There are two reasons for modifying a proposition so that it corresponds with reality: -is an obligation to present claims as accurately as possible (it refers to accuracy-oriented); - the need to anticipate what may be harmful to the reader (it refers to writer-oriented). Accuracy-oriented hedges can be further distinguished according to whether they involve a qualification of predicate intensity (attribute hedges) or writer confidence (reliability hedges). The first reflects the difficulties of using a limited language to describe the variability of natural phenomena, while the second indicates writers’ confidence in the certainty of their knowledge.

- reader-oriented-> a proposition which could be presented categorically from an objective perspective may be explicitly hedged because of reader consideration. Thus, reader-oriented hedges incorporate an awareness of interpersonal factors, meeting acceptability conditions.

In sum, hedges anticipate a need to justify claims because the writer is dependent on their ratification by the reader. The writer must make a hypothesis both about the nature of reality and about the acceptability of the hypothesis to an audience.

A FUZZY CATEGORY MODEL

Hedging devices are polypragmatic, that is they can convey a range of different meanings, often at the same time. So that the precise motivation for employing a hedge may not always be clear.

Four variables are important in determining core cases:

1. Specification

2. Verification

3. Agentivity

4. Cooperation

Each variable is related to hedging by assumptions it allows the reader to make about writer’s attitude to the proposition or its content.

1. A high degree of specification of propositional elements is associated with content-oriented strategies and particularly with attribute hedges. These determine how far the terms used accurately describe the events or states referred to in the proposition

2. Verification refers to the acknowledgement of uncertainties about the truth of a claim. It indicates the confidence that can be invested in a statement and is associated with reliability type accuracy hedges.

3. Agentivity, whether the action or state described in proposition is explicitly associated with the writer, is critical in distinguishing reader- and content-oriented hedges.

4. Co-operative features, such as incitation, offering alternatives and reference to shared assumptions, indicate the extent to which the writer seek to involve the reader in the ratification of the claim.

CONTENT-ORIENTED HEDGES

They mitigate the relationship between propositional content and a representation of reality, they hedge the correspondence between what the writer says about the world and what the world is thought to be like. The motivations for these hedges fall into two overlapping categories, concerning the writer’s focus on propositional accuracy or on self-protection from the consequences of poor judgement.

- ACCURACY-OREINTED HEDGES-> these involve the writer desire to express propositions with greater precision in areas often subject to revision. Hedging here is an important means of accurately

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