A diachronic analysis of hedging in non-native authors’ research article abstracts

Abstract

A growing part of studies on English for academic purpose explores how English is used in non-Anglophone contexts. This article focuses on the insufficiently studied context of Russia, where English has been used as a language of scientific publications only since the last decade. The paper explores hedging devices in Russian authors’ research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the use of these linguistic means. Exploring categories of hedges and suggesting reasons for diachronic changes in their use are other research questions. It is assumed their distribution could change over time. The improved English proficiency of Russian academic writers, the weakening intrusion of the national criteria of good writing and greater awareness of the Anglophone academic writing norms due to the need to publish internationally have influenced metadiscourse patterns in Russian-authored academic prose. The study is based on a corpus of 120 research article abstracts from the field of linguistics published in two Russian journals in 2010-2021. The theoretical framework followed here is Hyland’s (2018) taxonomy of hedges, which offers a pragmatically-grounded method for analyzing hedging in academic discourse.