HEDGING THROUGH THE USE OF MODAL AUXILIARIES IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

As a communicative strategy, hedging plays a central role in academic writing. Numerous different linguistic forms can be used to express this strategy. This article attempts to investigate modal auxiliary verbs as the principal means of expressing hedging in English academic discourse. For this pur...

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Main Author: Hardjanto, Tofan Dwi (Author)
Format: EJournal Article
Published: Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada, 2016-05-28.
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001 Humaniora_UGM_11412_8498
042 |a dc 
100 1 0 |a Hardjanto, Tofan Dwi  |e author 
100 1 0 |e contributor 
245 0 0 |a HEDGING THROUGH THE USE OF MODAL AUXILIARIES IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE 
260 |b Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada,   |c 2016-05-28. 
500 |a https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/jurnal-humaniora/article/view/11412 
520 |a As a communicative strategy, hedging plays a central role in academic writing. Numerous different linguistic forms can be used to express this strategy. This article attempts to investigate modal auxiliary verbs as the principal means of expressing hedging in English academic discourse. For this purpose, a corpus of 75 primary empirical research articles from economics, linguistics, medicine, natural sciences and engineering was analyzed quantitatively with the help of corpus linguistic method. The results revealed that modal auxiliaries were used most frequently in linguistics and economics and least frequently in engineering and natural sciences while their use in medicine came in between. This seems to suggest that there is noticeable disciplinary variation in the degree of hedging through the use of modal auxiliaries in English research articles. Modal auxiliaries tend to be more common in soft sciences than in hard sciences whereas their use in health sciences in comparison with soft and hard sciences does not seem to show any significant difference. 
540 |a Copyright (c) 2016 Tofan Dwi Hardjanto 
540 |a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 
546 |a eng 
690 |a academic discourse, hedging, modal auxiliaries, modality, research articles 
655 7 |a info:eu-repo/semantics/article  |2 local 
655 7 |a info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion  |2 local 
655 7 |a Peer-reviewed Article  |2 local 
786 0 |n Humaniora; Vol 28, No 1 (2016); 37-50 
786 0 |n 2302-9269 
786 0 |n 0852-0801 
787 0 |n https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/jurnal-humaniora/article/view/11412/8498 
856 4 1 |u https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/jurnal-humaniora/article/view/11412/8498  |z Get Fulltext