Evidentials, Code Glosses, Hedges and Boosters in Academic Articles: A Cross-Disciplinary Study

Abstract

This paper investigates the frequency and contextual uses of the metadiscoursal devices of evidentials, code glosses, hedges and boosters in four academic disciplines, namely, linguistics, literature, chemistry and medicine. Hyland and Hinkel’s taxonomies of metadiscourse provided the search items. The data analyzed consisted of a corpus of forty research articles, divided into four subcorpora equally drawn from the four disciplines. The corpus was randomly selected from leading international journals and processed by the corpus analysis toolkit, AntConc. The AntConc concordancer was employed so that each metadiscourse item could be counted and examined in its context. The findings show that hedges were the most frequent metadiscoursal device, which may be seen as an indication of the academic authors’ tendency to use language of caution and uncertainty. The second rank in frequency was occupied by evidentials, which reflects the need for academic writing to establish credibility. Code glosses and boosters have the least frequency, which may measure for the value of conciseness in academic discourse. The analysis also shows that linguistics and literature exceed the two scientific disciplines, chemistry and medicine, in the frequency of the four metadiscoursal devices. Linguistics manifests the highest distribution of hedges and code glosses, medicine the highest number of boosters, literature the highest frequency of evidentials. Chemistry has the lowest frequency of all metadiscoursal devices. This study aims to help students of academic writing to learn about the use of the selected metadiscoursal devices in many disciplines. Future studies need to investigate more metadiscoursal devices in other academic disciplines.