Semantic and Syntactic Realizations of Hedging in Introductions of Written Academic Discourse

What is it about?

This paper presents the results of comparing the introductions of twenty research articles in linguistics and literary criticism written by Iraqi lecturers at the Dept. of English ,college of Arts & Letters /Cihan university-Erbil, during the academic years 2015-2017.The analyses draw on Hyland's classification (1996) in an attempt to identify different functions of hedges and to describe their grammatical realizations with regard to genre-specific features of the examined texts. Results of the study revealed the fact that a variety of hedging expressions with different functions and frequencies is present in all examined texts though writers of linguistics tend to be less personal and more objective while those of literary criticism are more personal and subjective.

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