A Contrastive Study of Hedging in Medical Articles Written by Iranians and Non-Iranians

Hedging enables writers to show a perspective on their statements, to present unproven claims with prudence and to enter into a dialogue with their audiences. Medical articles show interesting examples of the use of hedging in scientific discourse, because they relate to important issues of our life.This study investigates the use of lexical hedging devices in discussion section of medical articles. Based on a corpus of 60 discussions collected from reputable medical journals, this study examines if frequency of hedging differs between Iranian and non-Iranian authors. The total numbers of words in discussion sectionsin non-Iranian and Iranian medical articles were 12,570 and 19,828 respectively. Analyses indicated that discussions written by non-Iranian authors had morehedging devices than the ones written by Iranians. The findings of this study showed that medical articles written by non-Iranian authors are 0.45 more hedged than the ones written by Iranian writers

Keywords:

Academic Writing , Corpus Analysis , Medical Articles , Hedges Devices , Hedging