Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Abstract

The interactional nature of academic discourse has been analyzed in linguistics literature from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly conducted on English materials. Little is known of how interactional metadiscourse elements are used in Russian academic prose and what diachronic changes in metadiscourse have occurred in the last decade. Building on previous research that suggests cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and diachronic differences in the use of hedges in academic prose, this paper explores functional categories of hedges used in Russian research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the functional realization of hedging, since it may be expected that it could change over time. The study was conducted on a corpus of 112 linguistics research article abstracts published in four Russian journals in two periods (2008-2014 and 2015-2021). To investigate hedging devices and their functional categories, this study employed quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis indicated that in the first period (2008-2014) hedging was most frequently realized through modals, reporting verbs, and quantifiers. In the second time span (2015-2021), reporting verbs, epistemic verbs, and adjectives of probability were among the most frequent functional categories of hedging. Overall, the distribution of functional categories of hedging changed in the second period when hedging was realized through a variety of lexical means belonging to different functional categories. In terms of the functions of hedging, the difference was also striking. In the first time span, hedges were employed to diminish an authorial presence in the text, while in the second one authors hedged to point toward possible methodological limitations and to signal inaccuracies of research results. Despite some data limitations, this study could be seen as a starting point for future research of metadiscourse in Russian-language academic prose from cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural or diachronic perspective.

The Effect of Rhetorical Styles on Metadiscourse Choices of Culturally Diverse Authors

“…The study was based on the assumption that the deployment of metadiscourse markers is considerably affected by the rhetorical styles the writers are exposed to. This assumption relied on previous studies of rhetorical traditions by Kaplan (1966), Galtung (1981), Hinds (1987), and some recent studies in the field of contrastive rhetoric (Alonso-Almeida, 2014;Belyakova, 2017;Boginskaya, 2022a;Dawang, 2006;Hryniuk, 2018;Hu & Cao, 2011;Işık-Taş, 2018;Lee & Casal, 2014;Lee & Deakin, 2016;Mikolaychik, 2019;Vassileva, 2001;Walková, 2018;Wu & Zhu, 2015, etc. ).…”

“…Based on Clyne's theory, Vassileva (1998) suggested that Slavic cultures follow the collective approach that resulted from communist ideology, which aims to suppress the individual in favour of the community. In the Slavic academic context, the use of the we pronoun, even in single-authored articles, is considered to be a sign of the author's membership in a disciplinary community, a manifestation of collectivism or authorial modesty (Boginskaya, 2022a;Čmejrková, 2007;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2013;Vassileva, 2001;Walková, 2018). Dontcheva-Navratilova (2013), for example, found that Czech authors tend to use authorial we when writing in English.…”

An Exploratory Analysis of Linking Adverbials Used by Filipino, Pakistani, and Thai Writers of English

“…Meanwhile, metadiscourse usage is likely to vary across disciplines due to the divergent nature of disciplines (Hyland, 2005). There were studies on the analysis of metadiscourse markers between disciplines of hard science and soft science such as engineering and linguistics (Boginskaya, 2022), material science and applied linguistics (Hu & Liu, 2022). Additionally, studies have also been conducted on metadiscourse markers in cross-disciplinary areas of soft science, such as applied linguistics, education and psychology (Hu & Cao, 2015), education and literature (Kan, 2016), and applied linguistics and economics (Khedri et al, 2013).…”

Text content variables as a function of comprehension: Propositional discourse analysis

“…Employing the concept of proximity, which embodies the idea of interaction and occurs when authors establish mutual interaction via the employment of rhetorical features (Alipour & Jahanbin 2020:799), and Hyland's definition of metadiscourse as "discourse about discourse" (Hyland 2005(Hyland , 2010, researchers divide metadiscourse markers into two categories: interpersonal and interactional (Waller 2015), which are also subdivided into frame markers including logical connectives (refer to discourse acts, sequences and stages), transitional markers (express relations between clauses), code glosses (elaborate propositional meaning), evidential markers (refer to information in other texts), endophoric (refer to information in other parts of text), attitude markers (expresses writer's attitude toward the propositional information), boosters (emphasize certainty and closes dialogue), hedges (withhold comment and open dialogue), engagement markers (explicitly build relationship with reader) and relational markers or self mention (explicitly refer to the writer) (Hyland 2004(Hyland , 2005(Hyland , 2010. Metadiscourse markers are used to present authorial claims, express a perspective on authorial statements, and to enter into a dialogue with the reader (Hyland 1996, Aull & Lancaster 2014, Alipour & Jahanbin 2020, Bolsunovskaya et al 2015, Boginskaya 2022. They "imply trustworthiness and concerns of addressees" (Alipour & Jahanbin 2020).…”