Abstract
Academic writing is rich in hedged proposition. Allowing writers to express their subjective comment or attitude to their statements or to show politeness to their readers, hedging devices are a significant characteristic of academic writing. This thesis investigates the usage of hedging in the introduction section of English academic journal articles written by Taiwanese graduate students. Hedges were identified by means of a contextual analysis, their frequency was recorded, and their percentages were computed. The hedges recorded were then classified according to five distinct grammatical classes, and their frequency and distribution per category in the introduction section was calculated by using Longman Mini-Concordancer. The results were interpreted according to the systemic functional theory. The results show that the two most frequently used hedging devices in the introduction section of the academic articles are modal lexical verbs and modal auxiliary verbs, which account for 67.3%of the total number of hedges used in our sample. We also analyze how the communicative purpose of the different 'Moves' in the introduction section influences the frequency of hedges used. Move 1 is the most heavily hedged section, whereas Move 2 is the least-hedged one. Finally, some teaching implications are proposed, suggesting that there are good reasons for assisting learners to develop an awareness of hedging in the academic discourse