Contrastive Analysis of Hedges in a Sample of Chinese and English Molecular Biology Papers

2004 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-493
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Gao

Hedge is defined as the expression of provisionalness and possibility that makes scientific messages tentative, vague, and imprecise, thereby reducing the force of claims scientists make. Linguistic study of hedges began in the early 1970s in generative semantics. Since then, the focus has shifted from seeking linguistic properties in spoken discourse to analyzing its pragmatic functions in written contextual communication. The purpose of this paper was to analyze hedges in Chinese and English scientific articles from the perspective of contrastive pragmatics. Based on a contextual analysis of 5 Chinese and 5 English scientific articles, selected randomly, from two journals in molecular biology— Science in China and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, there were significant differences between Chinese and English scientific articles in use of hedges.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Mayer Stolier ◽  
Eric Hehman ◽  
Matthias David Keller ◽  
Mirella Walker ◽  
Jonathan B. Freeman

This is a preprint of this manuscript, published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/22/1807222115), version dated July 30th, 2018 (date will be updated with preprint, old versions documented by OSF). Project data and analysis materials are available online: https://osf.io/z23kf/.


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