LEXICAL REALIZATIONS OF HEDGING IN THE ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

Hedging is considered a significant characteristic of academic writing, alongside other essential features, including complexity, formality, precision, objectivity, explicitness, accuracy, and responsibility. The phenomenon of hedging is highly diverse and encompasses a range of linguistic tools. This article examines the lexical realization of hedging in English academic discourse, with a particular focus on research articles in the field of philology. Hedging is viewed as a lexical-pragmatic strategy that enables authors to mitigate categorical claims, express epistemic caution, and maintain an appropriate level of objectivity in academic communication. Our research aims to examine the lexical realizations of hedging in English academic discourse, with a focus on research articles. Despite extensive scholarly attention to hedging in academic writing, its quantitative distribution across lexical categories in philological research articles remains insufficiently explored, which determines the relevance of the present study. The research is based on a corpus of 82 research articles published in reputable international journals in the field of philology. The analysis confirms that hedging is an integral pragmatic strategy in academic writing, enabling authors to express epistemic caution, mitigate categorical claims, and maintain an appropriate level of objectivity. The quantitative findings demonstrate that modal auxiliary verbs represent the most frequent grammatical category of hedging devices in the corpus, followed by adverbs and adjectives, highlighting their central role in shaping authorial stance in philological research articles. The frequency of hedging devices in the corpus is 18 words per one thousand words in the compiled corpus. That is, 1.8 % of words in the whole corpus are hedges. This finding suggests that the total number of such devices remains relatively low in the field of philology. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of hedging as a lexical-pragmatic phenomenon. It may serve as a basis for further comparative research into hedging strategies across disciplines, genres, or languages.