Lexical Hedges in English Abstract Writing

Hedge is a strategy by which one may indicate different degrees of less than full commitment to conceptualizations about the universe. The abstract is a condensed and concise summary of the academic paper where the writer expresses his/her points of view briefly. This paper adopts the taxonomy of hedges by Varttala, and analyzes, by the use of SPSS 16.0, the lexical hedges in these two corpora of English abstract writing. The findings show that these corpora are rich in the resource of lexical hedges, while both similarities and differences of using of lexical hedges exist in these two corpora. Some suggestions for Chinese English teachers on how to teach the use of lexical hedges will be provided in the end.