Graduate Students’ Use of Hedging Devices

Abstract

Hedging, or the mitigation of claims, is often regarded as a significant rhetorical strategy in academic writing. Writers` inability to make claims at an appropriate level may result in a failure to be accepted in the academic discourse community. The current study compiled a corpus of student writing and investigated graduate student writers` hedging behavior, with a specific focus on epistemic modality markers. A comparison of graduate student and expert writers` hedging practices shows that students use a greater number of hedging devices than expert writers. In addition, they rely on a limited range of epistemic items to hedge their writing, while epistemic nouns are noticeably under-used. In terms of epistemic commitment, these graduate student writers use more certainty than tentative markers. The results may imply a need for awareness raising among graduate students about hedging functions in academic writing.

規避詞（或是論點的緩和）經常被認為在學術寫作中是一個重要的修辭技巧。寫作者不能適切地發表主張，或許也就無法受到學術論述社群所接受。此研究蒐集了學生寫作的語料，並且探究研究生們的規避詞使用行為，尤其是認知情態詞標記。透過比較研究生以及專業作家的規避詞使用，顯示了學生比專業作家使用較多的規避詞。此外，他/她們使用有限的認知詞來使語氣上更婉轉，而認知名詞是最少使用到的。就認知投入而言，這些研究生使用了較多確定標記更甚於假設標記。研究結果建議有必須提升研究生們在學術寫作中規避功能的認識。