Metadiscourse in Persian-text research articles: A comparative study on hard and soft sciences

The present study sought to find any probable differences between the various functions of metadiscursive hedging devices in the ‘discussions’ of Persian-text research articles (RAs) written by Iranian academic authors in hard and soft sciences. Sixty (N = 60) discussions from Persian-text Iranian academic journals (from five disciplines in hard sciences and four disciplines in soft sciences) were randomly selected. Two human coders were asked to code the functions of hedging devices in the selected corpus based on the theoretical framework suggested by Hyland (1998). Results indicated that authors of hard-science RAs prefer content- and reader-oriented hedging devices and use them more frequently in their RA discussions whereas their soft-science counterparts prefer writer-oriented hedging. It is argued that these differences might be due to (a) personality traits, (b) politeness, (c) the nature of hard and soft sciences, or (d) a combination of all of these.