Hedging is a well-documented feature of spoken discourse as a result of its role in qualifying categorical commitment and facilitating discussion Its use in academic writing has received less attention, however, and we know little about the functions it serves in different research fields and particular genres Hedging is a significant communicative resource for academics since it both confirms the individual's professional persona and represents a critical element in the rhetorical means of gaining acceptance of claims Hedges allow writers to anticipate possible opposition to claims by expressing statements with precision, caution, and diplomatic deference to the views of colleagues Based on a contextual analysis of 26 articles in molecular biology, this paper argues that hedging in scientific research writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from social and institutional contexts and suggests a pragmatic framework which reflects this interpretive environment Hedging is the expression of tentativeness and possibility and it is central to academic writing where the need to present unproven propositions with caution and precision is essential Hedging has received a great deal of attention in conversation analysis where devices such as / think, sort of maybe, and possibly •are frequently used to create conviviality, facilitate discussion, show politeness, and oil the phatic wheels (eg Holmes 1984,1995, Coates 1987 Hedges have also been associated with conveying purposive vagueness (eg Powell 1985, Dubois 1987 , Channell 1994 , treated as a form of metadiscourse (e g Vande Kopple 1985, Cnsmore, Markkaned, and Steffensen 1993), and as a means of achieving distance between a speaker and what is said (e g Prince, Frader, and Bosk 1982, Skelton 1988) In linguistics, hedging has been the subject of a considerable body of conceptual and empirical research and we now know a great deal about the semantic and formal aspects of epistemic devices, particularly the modal auxiliaries (Lyons 1977, Coates 1983, Palmer 1990 Analyses of written academic corpora have revealed some of the characteristics of hedging in textbooks (Myers 1992) (Dubois 1987 , Channell 1990 ) and 'commentative' items (Adams-Smith 1984 ,Skelton 1988 Together, this literature has demonstrated the clear pragmatic importance of hedging as a discoursal resource for expressing uncertainty, scepticism, and open-mindedness about one's propositions However, hedging in scientific research writing represents a little-stud led area of pragmatic competence and we still know little about how it functions or is typically realized in specific academic domains In particular, greater attention needs to be paid to the fact that hedging represents a writer's attitude within a particular context There is, therefore, a need for an explanatory framework which accounts for its pervasiveness in academic discourse by situating hedging in its socio-pragmatic contexts The most cogent attempt to place hedges within a comprehensive functional structure is that of Myers (1985 Myers ( , 1989 who argues that hedges are part of a wider system of politeness designed to redress the threat research claims contain to the 'face' of other scientists While writers seek to gain recognition in their field by making the strongest claims they can, such claims are likely to challenge existing assumptions of the discipline and undermine colleagues' research agendas A vanety of devices are therefore employed to mitigate claims and minimize these impositions Myers' work is clearly suggestive and central to any discussion of hedging, but his extension of Brown and Levtnson's (1987) conversational model provides only a partial account of hedging in scientific discourse The fact that the public reputation and professional position of every scientist depends on the work and acceptance of peers means a failure to observe appropriate norms of conduct will not merely prevent individuals securing goals, but will incur sanctions with concrete consequences Treating hedging as politeness thus accents the instrumental over the normative, thereby underplaying the importance of authority and conformity in academic discourse communities, and at the same time neglects the multi-functional character of hedges in gaining acceptance for claims In science, hedges play a cntical role in gaining ratification for claims from a powerful peer group by allowing writers to present statements with appropriate accuracy, caution, and humility Hedges help negotiate the perspective from which conclusions can be accepted This paper provides a functional account for the use of hedging m scientific research articles It is based on a detailed contextual analysis of a 75,000-word corpus of 26 articles selected from recent issues of the six leading journals in the field of cell and molecular biology (SCI 1993) A description of the major hedging expressions and their distribution in this corpus can be found elsewhere (Hyland 1996) My purpose here is to extend and build on previous work to propose an explanatory framework for scientific hedging which combines sociological, linguistic, and discourse analytic perspectives The study draws together strands from different studies to reveal a complex overlap of motivations for hedging I suggest here that hedges can only be understood in terms of a detailed characterization of the institutional, professional, and linguistic contexts in which they are employed The role of human judgement in data interpretation, widely accepted in the philosophy of science (eg Kuhn 1970, Van Frasen 1980, Faust 1984, Kourany 1987, implies that a study of scientific discourse is central to understanding the creation of knowledge Knowledge is influenced by the basic elements of the communication process writer, audience, language, and reality This is because transforming claims into knowledge requires reader acceptance and therefore linguistic and rhetorical means of persuasion (eg Brufee 1986) This need for community consensus in the ratification of knowledge, I believe, provides the foundation for the expression of tentativeness and caution in scientific writing statements must reflect the certainty the writer wishes to invest in them In introducing claims, writers rely on evidential support from statements previously confirmed by the discourse community as truths about the world, and these can be expressed as categorical assertions Every other statement, by which the writer asserts the content to be true as far as he or she knows, is a hedged or non-factive statement The ratification of knowledge, of a connection between a state of affairs used as evidence in support of a hypothesis and the hypothesis itself, is not self-evident but depends on an audience for whatever epistemic status it achieves Most work in normal science (Kuhn 1970), which contributes to the cumulative extension of the discipline, is of this non-factive character, referring to what is possibly true rather than what is certain (1) I suggest therefore that Dl degradability must be causally linked to Q B site occupation which in turn determines PEST region accessibility to (2) Possibly, phosphorylation of ACC synthase could contribute to the existence of its differenl pi forms Alternatively, phosphorylation-dephosphorylation may be involved in the inactivation/activation of the enzyme in vivo Where there is uncertainty about the evidential status of the assumptions between data and hypotheses, claims require varying degrees of hedging In fact, my data indicates that few knowledge claims are presented in unmitigated form induction and inference rather than deduction and causality characterize most arguments in scientific discourse Thus, writers may have strong grounds for trusting the relations between accepted premises and new results, but uncertainty, caution, and interpersonal factors prevent the categorical assertion of such claims In most cases, probability is explicit and negatability anticipated Writers must acknowledge gaps and limitations in order to present claims and conclusions in the light of accepted knowledge 3 HEDGING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ARTICLES The publication of scientific results seeks to accomplish both institutional and individual goals A research paper not only extends understanding of phenomena and theories that the current paradigm deems worthy of study, but also helps support or establish the personal reputation of the writer As I have noted, in seeking recognition for their accomplishments writers will therefore generally make the strongest claim for which they have epistemic authority Research scientists acquire academic credibility by gaining readers' acceptance of the most significant assertions their findings will support Securing this objective involves relating lllocutionary acts to perlocutionary effects A wnter wants a message to be understood (an lllocutionary effect) and to be accepted (a hoped for perlocutionary effect) But no matter how clearly, convincingly, and appropriately reader-centred material may be expressed, the writer's ability to influence the reader's response is severely restricted Longino (1990) argues that there is no independent scientific framework for distinguishing the observational from the theoretical and so interpretation of each change depends on what can be contested and what taken for granted So, if'truth' does not lie exclusively in the external world, there is always at least one plausible interpretation of particular data Readers may therefore be persuaded to judge a claim acceptable or may decide to reject it This view distinguishes comprehension from interpretation (e g Perfetti and McCutchen 1987) While lexical and syntactic forms determine text meanings, interpretation is unconstrained and subject to knowledge effects which depend on higher-level reasoning skills and world knowledge which are beyond the writer's control The scientific wnter can only guide the reader to a particular interpretation through the use of formal meanings but external factors, particularly the reader's prior knowledge, affect interpretation (cf Bazerman 1985) Readers can always refute a claim All statements require ratification and because readers are guarantors of the negatabihty of claims this gives them an active and constitutive role in how wnters construct them This is why mitigation is central to academic wnting, as hedging signals the writer's anticipation of the opposition to a proposition This opposition can be divided into two types, content-and reader-oriented First, claims have to correspond with what is believed to be true in the world Hedges here will be referred to as 'content-oriented' and concern a statement's adequacy conditions the relationship between a proposition and a representation of reality (eg example (3)) Secondly, a proposition which could be presented categoncally from an objective perspective may be explicitly hedged because of reader considerations Thus, reader-onented hedges incorporate an awareness of interpersonal factors, meeting acceptability conditions (eg example (4)) (3) This implies that the extent to which the endophyte might effect N metabolism under field conditions could also depend considerably upon other interacting factors (4) From our investigations we conclude that the data of Wydrzynski et al can be seen in a different light when the adverse effects of CI depnvation are seen in conjunction with In sum, hedges anticipate a need to justify claims because the wnter is dependent on their ratification by the reader The wnter must make a hypothesis both about the nature of reality and about the acceptability of the hypothesis to an audience, the question of adequacy corresponding to the objective negatabihty of a proposition and acceptability to its subjective negatabihty Content-onented hedges can be expressed at two further levels of delicacy First, there are two distinct reasons for modifying a proposition so that it corresponds with reality One is an obligation to present claims as accurately as possible, the second concerns the need to anticipate what may be harmful to the wnter The two are likely to overlap in actual use but forms will be referred to respectively as accuracy-oriented (eg example (5)) and wnter-oriented reasoning (e g example (6)) (5) These EGTA clots are transparent and possibly comprised of thinner fibres than the (6) The figures suggest that the determining factor for the protein response was whether Accuracy-oriented hedges can be further distinguished according to whether they involve a qualification of predicate intensity {attribute hedges) or wnter confidence (reliability hedges) The first reflect the difficulties of using a limited language to describe the variability of natural phenomena (7), while the second indicate writers' confidence in the certainty of their knowledge (8) (7) Staining was generally confined to the vascular tissues (8) The photoreceptor involved is somehow related to the photosynthetic apparatus itself This model is summarized in Figure 1 In summary, this framework seeks to account for the form of sentences by showing how they anticipate possible objections Scientists gain and keep reputations by making the highest level claims they can, demonstrating that they deserve credit for something new But in presenting such claims they must meet both adequacy and acceptability conditions They therefore use hedges to reduce the risk of negation on objective grounds, i e the match between propositional content and what reality is believed to be like, and on subjective grounds, relating to acceptable levels of self-assertion, deference, and willingness to debate Both are epistemically modahzed forms of speech where what is said is related to what is meant by a regard for reader perspective 4 A FUZZY CATEGORY MODEL Analysis of epistemic language use soon reveals that hedging devices are polypragmatic, they can convey a range of different meanings, often at the same time As a result, they do not fit into a neat scheme of discrete categones which allows one meaning to be clearly distinguished from Others Moreover, not only is it impossible to relate particular forms exclusively to specific functions, but the expression of simultaneous meanings introduces the problem of indeterminacy in specifying cases So while hedging devices express writers' attitudes to both propositions and addressees, the choice of a particular device does not always permit a single, unequivocal pragmatic interpretation Particular forms Figure 1 Categorization of scientific hedges often convey more than one function and a complex overlap of usage suggests that the precise motivation for employing a hedge may not always be clear We cannot assume a given device will always function to hedge propositional content, for example, nor that evidence for a particular function will always be found in the linguistic environment The resulting ambiguity can, of course, become an important strategic option for waters when presenting information Consequently a theory of fuzzy-sets with graded membership, as proposed by Zadeh (1972) and taken up by Coates (1983), appears to offer a better approach A fuzzy-set is a class with unsharp boundaries, that is, a class in which the transition from membership to non-membership is gradual rather than abrupt (Zadeh 1972 4) Zadeh observes that fuzziness plays an essential role in human cognition and believes that most classes in the real world are fuzzy The essential feature of fuzzy-sets is that they allow the gradual transition to membership so cases are not restricted to binary end-points but can range between them, with some examples denoting a greater degree of membership of one category than another At the core, an expression will most closely approximate to the meaning of that category while examples at the periphery will exhibit less precise meaning Thus, core examples of wnter-onented hedges will involve self-protection by hedging commitment, while examples toward the penphery will show more concern with propositional accuracy Such a model accounts for the vaganes of my corpus and recognizes the flexibility between language and context which serves several concurrent goals Moreover, analysis reveals the importance of four variables in determining core cases These concern the degree of specification, venfication. agentivity, and cooperation Each variable is related to hedging by the assumptions it allows the reader to make about the wnter's attitude to the proposition or its context The first point concerns the extent to which the propositional content is precisely expressed A high degree of specification of propositional elements is associated with content-oriented strategies and particularly with attribute hedges These determine how far the terms used accurately describe the events or states referred to in the proposition Verification refers to the acknowledgement of uncertainties about the truth of a claim It indicates the confidence that can be invested in a statement and is associated with reliability type accuracy hedges Agentivtty, whether the action or state described in the proposition is explicitly associated with the writer, is cntical in distinguishing reader-and content-oriented hedges Core examples of content hedges occur in non-writer agent contexts, while reader-oriented cases are generally found in writer agent environments Finally, co-operative features, such as invitations, offering alternatives and reference to shared assumptions, indicate the extent to which the writer seeks to involve the reader in the ratification of the claim The model suggests the following tentative generalizations in determining core cases
In related work, REF associates the use of speculative language in scholarly publications with the purpose for which they are employed by the authors.
Writing Without Conviction? Hedging in Science Research Articles
Applied Linguistics
Sociology