Hedging in nursing and education academic articles
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Abstract
Purpose – The study aims to investigate how and why hedges are used in nursing and education academic research articles and find out whether there are differences between the two disciplines in using hedges and their subcategories. Design/methodology/approach – The realization of hedges in 50 academic articles representing both disciplines, namely education and nursing, was scrutinized and analyzed. Findings – The study reveals that there are significant differences between the nursing and education writers' use of hedging in the total use of hedging devices and their subcategories, in favor of the education discipline. This indicates that writers of education articles use hedges more frequently than the writers of nursing articles. In support of previous literature, it concludes that hedging devices are used as communicative strategies to qualify writers' commitment, reduce the force of the researchers' statements, express probability, save the writers' face, persuade readers, and avoid any possible reje...