A Comparative Study of Hedging and Boosting in Academic Articles from Eight Disciplines

Abstract

Hedges and boosters are important metadiscursive resources for writers to mark their epistemic stance and position writer_x005freader relations. Building on previous research on the differences in the use of hedges and boosters in academic discourse, this study
investigates the use of such discourse markers in academic articles from eight disciplines. Based on a corpus of 160 journal articles collected
from 8 disciplines of Philosophy, Sociology, Linguistics, Economics, Physics, Cytology, Medicine, and Engineering, this study examines
(a) the diff erences and similarities in the use of hedges and boosters in eight disciplines and (b) the diff erences and similarities in the use of
diff erent types of hedges and boosters in eight disciplines. The study fi nds that academics in soft disciplines employ more metadiscourse
markers to construct their writings than those in natural sciences, and the percentage of the frequencies of hedges and boosters in each
discipline is diff erent. Writers in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences more rely on hedges, while writers in the natural sciences
incline to use more boosters. Besides, the frequency of the use of specifi c categories of hedges and boosters varied across disciplines.