VACANA
School of Liberal Arts
Mae Fah Luang University
School of Liberal Arts
Mae Fah Luang University
ISSN: 2287-0903
Abstract
This comparison study investigates the numbers and frequencies of lexical hedging types between two corpora: the first corpus was the academic articles written by Thai college students majoring in English, and the other was the published articles from “Science Direct”, the database widely accepted by scholars in linguistic fields. The use of hedges and the frequencies in the corpora were identified, quantified and compared based on Hyland’s (1998) and Schmied (2008) classification of hedges. The results show that all types of lexical hedges and modal auxiliaries were found most frequently in both corpora. However, the student writers used lexical hedges more often in their texts when compared with the professional researchers who published their articles in international journals even though the choices of words used are less than those found in published articles. The underlying reasons why the students used those two types most frequently can be partly from lessons in previous courses in which quantifiers and modal auxiliaries were emphasized.
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