HEDGING THROUGH THE USE OF MODAL AUXILIARIES IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
Abstract: As a communicative
strategy, hedging plays a central role in academic writing. Numerous different
linguistic forms can be used to express this strategy. This article attempts to
investigate modal auxiliary verbs as the principal means of expressing hedging
in English academic discourse. For this purpose, a corpus of 75 primary
empirical research articles from economics, linguistics, medicine, natural
sciences and engineering was analyzed quantitatively with the help of corpus
linguistic method. The results revealed that modal auxiliaries were used most
frequently in linguistics and economics and least frequently in engineering and
natural sciences while their use in medicine came in between. This seems to
suggest that there is noticeable disciplinary variation in the degree of
hedging through the use of modal auxiliaries in English research articles.
Modal auxiliaries tend to be more common in soft sciences than in hard sciences
whereas their use in health sciences in comparison with soft and hard sciences
does not seem to show any significant difference.
Author: Tofan Dwi Hardjanto
Journal Code: jpantropologigg160009
