Reza Abdi - Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil, Iran
Sakineh Gholami Gohareh - Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil, Iran

Penetration of traces of law in every aspects of our daily lives from buying a ticket as a formal contract to be in a court, indicates the importance of research in this genre and the importance of being familiar with special discoursive patterns and rhetorical devicesamong legal communities. Among different legal genres, this paper studies research articles (RA) as the most favorable genre of communication among academia inwhich there is lack of corpus-based studies and interrogates metadiscourse markers (hedges and boosters) by which writers try to negotiate interactional meaning with their imagined readers. Boostersand hedges respectively show the degree of certainty and uncertainty of the writers about their propositions. This paper aims to investigate if there is any significant difference in the frequency of employinghedges and boosters in Farsi legal RAs or not. The corpus is consisted of 100 Farsi legal RAs all of which has been analyzed manually to investigate the frequency of occurrences of each of boosters andhedges according to Hyland‟s (2005) model. After employing chisquare test to the results, the article raises the awareness of the use of hedging as more accepted metadiscoursive marker in comparison withboosters among the Iranian legal community and concludes that by using hedges as those rhetorical devices for demonstrating uncertainty in legal propositions, writers of this genre respect for differentpossible interpretations of legal arguments. This specific kind of writing in this genre can raise awareness for teaching purposes among Iranian law students and others who are interested in legal issues in Iran to be more familiar with the nature of this field.

legal research articles, metadiscourse markers, hedges, boosters