Attribute and Reliability Hedging Devices in English, Czech and Slovak Research Articles.

This paper is a cross-cultural investigation into attribute and reliability hedges in research papers on applied linguistics published in journals in English, Czech and Slovak. Overall, 30 research articles have been examined using discourse and corpus analysis. Although Čmejrková et al. (1999) assert that modality and a low degree of decisiveness are more typical for Czech scientific publications than for English, the findings demonstrate that hedges are employed considerably more frequently and are more varied in the selected articles written in English than in Czech and Slovak. This could be connected with the writer’s choice of vocabulary or with limited literature focusing on academic vocabulary in the Slavic languages. The wider variety of hedging expressions in the articles written in English could be the consequence of the historical impact of Latin and French on the language, which provided synonyms to the already existing Anglo-Saxon expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]