A Comparative Genre Analysis of Hedging Expressions in Research Articles: Is Fuzziness Forever Wicked?

Behnam, Biook; Naeimi, Amin; Darvishzade, Ali

doi:10.5539/ells.v2n2p20

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…Fraser 1990;Redeker 1990;Aijmer 2002), genre (e.g. Hyland 1998;McLaren-Hankin 2008;Abdollahzadeh 2011;Behnam, Naeimi and Darvishzade 2012), cross-linguistic/-cultural comparison (e.g. Poveda Cabanes 2007;Defrancq and De Sutter 2010; Hu and Cao 2011; Jalilifar and Alavi-Nia 2012; Yang 2013), just to name those which seem to feature most prominently in a voluminous literature on the subject.…”

Section: Hedges: Origins and Definitional Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do hedges always hedge?

Adamczyk¹

2022

PRAG

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One of the canonical uses of jakby in Polish is that of the Lakoffian hedge, which modifies the propositional content of an utterance by pointing to its fuzziness, inexactitude or approximation. In conversational speech the word is frequently put to excessive use, which appears to significantly deviate from the prescribed one, and as such deserves closer attention. The aim of the present study, which makes use of corpus linguistics tools to collect naturally-occurring data and discourse analysis framework to manually examine them, is twofold. Initially, it sets out to examine the linguistic contexts of jakby, which are assumed to furnish valuable guidelines for sifting out the prototypical uses of the word from the innovative ones. Next, the focus shifts onto indentifying context-sensitive functions of the latter in highly diversified stretches of discourse. The research findings demonstrate that the cotextual settings of the non-canonical jakby exhibit a number of distinctive characteristics, such as frequent co-occurrence of the word with pragmatic markers, reflexive discourse and unfilled pauses, all indicative of its relatively tenuous link with the neighbouring portions of text. As regards the functions of the unconventional jakby, the word emerges as a pragmatically multifunctional yet no longer hedging device, capable of, among others, facilitating floor-holding/-grabbing, helping to plan discourse, marking register clash and introducing elaboration on prior thought. Rich in pragmatic functions and syntactically more detached from the adjacent textual material than its canonical base, the investigated jakby appears to fit into the category of propositionally empty yet strategically salient pragmatic markers.

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Section: Hedges: Origins and Definitional Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do hedges always hedge?

Adamczyk¹

2022

PRAG

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“…Se consideriamo la tradizione internazionale in merito, notiamo un crescente numero di studi che analizzano la mitigazione in relazione al contesto e alla scrittura accademici, talvolta dalla prospettiva dell'insegnamento delle lingue straniere, e spesso in un'ottica contrastiva che prende solitamente come punto di riferimento l'inglese (Hyland 1996(Hyland , 1998Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza 2004;Nguyen 2008, Hu, Cao 2011Behnam, Naeimi, Darvishzade 2012;Itakura 2013). In ambito italiano pos1siamo citare Caffi (1991) e Carli (1999), che hanno analizzato la presenza di mitigatori rispettivamente nelle introduzioni delle tesi di laurea degli Giordano.…”

Section: Scrittura Accademica Mitigazione E Italiano L2unclassified

Mitigazione, italiano LS e scrittura accademica

Giordano

2018

Studi E Ricerche

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In order to be able to properly accommodate the increasing number of foreign students attending Italian universities, to make the Italian university system more attractive and finally to provide more accurate and refined tools, we would need to take actions whose final objective is to improve the quality of the reception and the education offer. The goal of the present study is to present a tool, a test to detect the use of mitigation strategies by university students of Italian as a FL/SL, that goes on this direction and that can be used in research and experiments in the domains of linguistics, teaching techniques and intercultural communication. A pilot study of this test is currently being carried out at the University of Utrecht, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. In what follow I will present both the reasons and the choices of the design and some preliminary results.

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“…To better understand how scientists are communicating their findings, linguists and scientists in several disciplines have analysed the use of hedges and boosters within their respective bodies of literature. Hedging is a rhetorical means to convey the degree of uncertainty associated with a statement or an assertion [14,23,36]. For example, in the following sentence, the underlined words are hedges: "this might might might might might might might might might might might might might might might might might be due to [...], which suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests suggests that [...]".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Definitely Maybe: Hedges And Boosters in the HCI Literature

Besançon¹,

Jansen²,

Cockburn³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Introduction: Hedges and boosters are terms respectively used to decrease and increase the strength of statements. They are therefore essential lexical tools in scientific communication, in particular in fields conducting human-subjects experiments such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).Objectives: We present an analysis of the use of hedges and boosters in the proceedings of the main HCI conference, namely CHI, between 2010 and 2018 to better understand how CHI authors report empirical findings.Methods: We only considered papers reporting a user study and focused our analysis on the sentences in the abstract that describe empirical results. We used a program to detect boosters and hedges and manually adjusted their classifications.Results: We found that CHI studies reporting inferential statistics are more likely to boost than they hedge. Conclusion: Our work intends to raise awareness within the HCI community of the importance of hedging and boosting when reporting research results. Further, our results establish a baseline of the current use of these linguistic devices in HCI, adding to the current body of linguistic research. We finally contribute tools, procedures, and materials to facilitate future analyses of hedges and boosters in scientific communication. Reproducibility: All data and scripts are available on https://osf.io/kefmr/

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A Comparative Genre Analysis of Hedging Expressions in Research Articles: Is Fuzziness Forever Wicked?

Cited by 14 publications

References 64 publications

Do hedges always hedge?

Do hedges always hedge?

Mitigazione, italiano LS e scrittura accademica

Definitely Maybe: Hedges And Boosters in the HCI Literature

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