Hedging: an exploratory study of authors' and readers' identification of 'toning down' in scientific texts

This article represents a very tentative attempt to explore this conceptual space. In Study I, I asked authors to identify hedges in their own texts, and their motivation for using them. In Study II, I presented three of these texts to EAP students (PhD candidates), requesting them to identify the hedges. There are three main findings. Firstly, the authors' choices of hedges did not coincide with definitions previously reported in the literature. Secondly, the authors did not cite politeness as a general motivation for hedging. Thirdly, there was a great divergence between readers' and authors' identifications; in general, readers identified many more instances of hedges than were intended by the authors. If validated on a larger scale, these findings have implications for instruction in reading and writing scientific articles.