COMPARING HEDGES USED BY ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN SCHOLARS IN PUBLISHED RESEARCH ARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

The study examines whether English and Indonesian research articles written by their respective native speaker scholars are significantly different from each other in terms of the number of hedges used. Hedges are rhetorical features (e.g. may, perhaps, suggest) used to withhold complete commitment to the truth-value of propositions. The ultimate goal of the study is to examine whether Indonesian scholars need special instruction in hedging propositions. The assumption underlying the present study is that when they write in English, Indonesian scholars will deploy rhetorical features inherent in the Indonesian academic writing. Statistical analysis on 52 Applied Linguistics research articles (26 from each language) reveals that English research articles contain significantly more hedges than their Indonesian counterparts (Mann-Whitney U = 68.00, n1 = n2 = 26, p < 0.05, r = - 0.69), suggesting that Indonesian scholars are indeed in need of instruction that specifically focuses on hedging propositions in English.