hedging; metadiscourse; academic genres

Drawing on the theory of metadiscourse, the chapter focuses on one category, hedges, and compares their occurrence and use in two academic genres, the research article and the undergraduate textbook. Firstly, the chapter discusses different models of hedges in scientific writing, especially Hyland?s polypragmatic model (1998). The analysis focuses on hedging devices used in the two genres, and the results suggest that the differences were not only quantitative but also qualitative. While the most frequent hedges in the research articles proved to be epistemic lexical verbs, the textbooks showed the highest incidence of adverbs, which were also the only hedging devices that occurred more frequently in the textbooks than in the RAs. Finally, the implications for metadiscourse theory are addressed.