hedging in scientific research articles

Hedging in Scientific Research Articles

• Preface |  p. viii
• Acknowledgments |  p. x
• On Hedging and Hedges |  p. 1
• Towards a context of scientific hedging |  p. 13
• Perspective and hedging in discourse |  p. 38
• Theoretical and Methodological considerations |  p. 81
• Surface features of hedging |  p. 102
• A pragmatic analysis of hedging |  p. 156
• Examining hedges in scientific discourse |  p. 189
• Hedging and second language learners |  p. 217
• Conclusions and Implications |  p. 244
• Notes |  p. 265
• Appendix: corpus of journal articles |  p. 267
• Index |  p. 304

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Hedging in scientific research articles

Author: hyland, ken.

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies which qualify categorical commitment; they are devices used to express possibility rather than certainty. But while hedging is a well documented phenomenon in spoken discourse, where it plays important interpersonal and facilitative roles, its use in academic writing has received less attention and we know little about its frequency, distribution or use in different disciplines or genres. This thesis was therefore undertaken to provide a comprehensive study of this feature in the discourse of a major scientific discipline, relating a systematic analysis of linguistic forms to a pragmatic explanation for their use. The results demonstrate that hedging is a major aspect of academic argument and confirms its centrality to both individual scientists and to science itself. The study is based on a contextual analysis of 26 research articles in cell and molecular biology. The research identifies the major forms of hedging, their distribution and pragmatic functions in this corpus and presents an explanatory framework which accounts for its significance in the research article genre. In addition to a detailed study of these articles, a concordance analysis of over 780, 000 words from three large corpora of academic English were examined to provide comparisons to help determine differences in the frequencies and range of hedging expressions used. The findings show that hedging is integral to the rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims in scientific writing as it allows writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and anticipate possible objections. Because they enable writers to express claims with precision, caution and diplomatic deference to the views of colleagues, hedges are a critical resource for academics and a defining feature of scientific research articles. The thesis consists of four central arguments. The first is that hedges are employed to achieve a single primary objective: to overcome the inherent negatability of statements and gain the reader’s acceptance of a knowledge claim. Second, it suggests that in achieving this objective hedges can emphasise an orientation to either the proposition or the reader and that the former may focus primarily on achieving propositional accuracy or minimising writer accountability. Third the thesis shows that in actual use the epistemic and affective functions of hedges are often conveyed simultaneously. The precise motivation for a particular use may therefore often be ambiguous and this indeterminacy prevents the formation of discrete descriptive categories. The fourth main argument is that hedging in scientific research writing is the product of informational, rhetorical and personal choices and cannot be fully understood in isolation from its social and institutional contexts. An explanation for hedging therefore requires a detailed characterisation of the institutional, professional and linguistic elements of this context, which my analysis seeks to provide by exploiting sociological, compositional and discourse analytic perspectives. .................

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• v.22(4); Oct-Dec 2018

Hedging, Weasel Words, and Truthiness in Scientific Writing

Douglas e. ott.

School of Engineering Mercer University Macon, Georgia, USA.

Background and Objectives:

Words in scientific discourse must be truthful. Introducing ambiguity or creating a false narrative by insinuating close counts or almost statements as facts that appeal to a truth the writer wants to exist doesn't make it true. A reader's personal interpretation because of hedging or weasel words creates an opportunity for truthiness as a belief to become a fact when it isn't.

Conclusion:

Awareness by scientists of this situation will make article reading more critical and related to reality rather than what you want an author wants it to be.

INTRODUCTION

How things are written and the words used to disseminate, convey information, and tell others matter. Writing plainly with clarity and precision matters. Research is about finding facts. Truth is a value assigned to an assertion that can be proved. A fact is a true proposition. Facts can be checked and tested. In reading articles, authors try to influence understanding using language to extend unverifiable statements and agendas or to influence thinking by suggesting a connection using “hedging” or “weasel” words. Statements can just be poorly written or say things about the subject that are unsettled and in flux. Or there is misrepresentation, misleading, lying, skewing, propaganda, an agenda, puffery, deception, ambiguity, distortion, confusion, dishonesty, pretext, or deceit. Words by themselves have definitions. The part of a statement preceding or following a specific word or group of words influences(s) meaning, and its effect defines context. The reader has a responsibility to have a heightened awareness, beware of weasel words, and to know facts from wishful thinking or to make circumstances fit a situation.

Finding facts under constraints (scientific method) reduces uncertainty. A fact remains a fact until proven otherwise. Researchers find and establish facts with reproducible evidence. How data is interpreted matters just as how things are said and not said. Fact finding evidence eliminates ignorance. How wording is used around fact statements can be used to create ambiguity or a version of the truth that is in the eye of the beholder. Science is not fantasy or a convenient attribution that makes association a cause. Science is not an exercise in justifying personal cognitive dissonance. Creating factoids or making findings equal to “close counts” does not advance science or make them facts.

Scientific writing has become littered with weasel words that hedge, cause ambiguity, introduce conjecture and inference as reliance, resulting in a travesty of intellectual honesty. “A weasel word is a modifying word that undermines or contradicts the meaning of the word, phrase, or clause it accompanies.” 1 They are used to intentionally mislead or misinform. The term first appeared in a short story (“Stained Glass Political Platform”) by Chaplin in 1900, who wrote “And what may weasel words be? Why weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. If you heft the egg afterward it's as light as a feather, and not very filling when you are hungry, but a basket full of them would make quite a show, and bamboozle the unwary”. 2

Weasel words connect flimsy data to justify an opinion. This influences your thinking without you thinking unless you have a trust but verify attitude. Misdirection or slight of facts appealing to your gut or emotions is not the standard for assessing a truth teller nor is it an accurate barometer of complex scientific issues. Writers introduce vagueness with double meaning words causing ambiguity or to deliberately avoid commitment to facts.

An additional travesty added to hedging and weasel words is truthiness. This double whammy of linguistic manipulation and scientific populism of psychological irrationality is a setback for evidence, facts and truth. Truthiness is an unfortunate popular and ubiquitous fault of poor, lazy or manipulative thinking. It is an individual's personal intuition or perception accepted without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts. 3 It is self-duplicity based either in ignorance, unconscious or deliberate deception. It is wrong headedness. Using truthiness, rather than facts, in science posits wishes to be true rather than facts ruling the day. Using weasel and hedging words in scientific writing create truthiness around an unproven statement is an abhorrent practice. This is also called falseness, wishful thinking, opinion, or belief without proof. Feelings and beliefs are not facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. How things are written or stated influences understanding. Interpretation of words is up to the reader. Truthiness is the truth you want to be not what is. Changing scientific behavior due to poor or cleverly misleading language can have consequences for you and your patients. Changing clinical behavior because of hedged words creating spurious associations due to truthiness from proven factual tenants diminishes outcomes and puts patients at increased risk.

Scientific outcomes matter, how you read and interpret scientific writing also matters. The choice of words by the author can be deliberate and innocent or manipulative, hedged and weaseled. Truthiness is philosophically related to emotivism. “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” 4 As scientists we must make our judgments fact-based and reasoned, not emotional. Accepting a writer's truthiness means you just don't care or you just don't get it.

Add to this mix the potency and permanence of the Internet. The Internet is a remarkable enabler of truthiness and misinformation that becomes digitally memorialized. 5 Statements used in science that aren't facts insinuated as truth, replacing it with truthiness, is objectionable and dangerous. It is either scientific perversion or delusional rationalization. Science is not satire. Facts are not about intuition without regard to logic or factual evidence. Until truth and facts get back together no progress will be made. Ignorance will be advanced with disastrous outcomes for patients of readers who do not call out sloppy weak writers of truthiness or users of weasel words. Einstein said that “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” Weasel words and truthiness in scientific writing says the gut knows better because it has the illusion of knowledge.

Poor writing is one thing, intentionally misleading is another. You, the reader, do not know the ulterior motives of the author(s). Honest scientists must be able to separate fact from fiction and not be lulled or misled into being immune to facts. Judgments are not only based on information we are considering but also the way the information is processed and organized. Our information processing can lead to biases when considering new information. Psychologically we attempt to remember bits of consistent information. The more easily these bits of information are retrieved, the more likely the new information is going to be tagged as true. This ease-of-recall is known as fluency and has wide-ranging effects. We judge fluent information (the easy just introduced statement) as more true than we realize. The ease with which we bring fluent information to mind leads to an assortment of biases in decision-making. 6 This mental shorthand preferentially interprets recently read material with hedging weaselly words and truthiness statements as proven facts which they are not.

“Hedging” as a term for words used in scientific writing “whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy” with caveats like “may,” “would,” “possible,” “could,” “might,” “suggest,” “seem,” “assume,”“indicate,” and “should” was initiated in 1972. 7 The purpose of hedging is a linguistic means of indicating a lack of commitment to the truth of a proposition and as an opening for the writer to introduce alternative unproven claims to influence readers. The body of work on the use of hedges in scientific writing has been advanced since then identifying their use as the authors desire for social approval and professional recognition without expressing commitment to established facts and to create detachment from reality. 8 The concept of truthiness is an unwelcome addition to hedging and weasel words introducing a preferred narrative of truth without proof.

Inferences made from statistical analysis, because they are made under constraints and limitations, are important both when they are significant and when they are not. An inference is not hypothesis. Inferences are derived from observational evidence. A hypothesis is proposed, untested, a proposal as to what is thought will be proven: it is why you test it. When the statistical inference testing is not met, the inference is not valid. It is wise to be more critical of our feelings and regard truthiness as a delusional psychosis of wishful thinking and to be avoided. A distorted narrative or creating an ideology of skewed interpretation creates and reinforces the illusion of knowledge. 5 Pascal in De L'Art de Persuader said “people almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” 9

When you see these weasel or hedging words or phrases, you must be vigilant about what is being said or not said and whether or not the writing or claim(s) are on solid ground or in the quicksand of grandiose justification of hyperbole. Conditional hedging or weasel words or expressions create a façade that is imprecise, vague, unclear, uncertain, and elusive and introduces doubt, ambiguity, suspicion, uncertainty, and confusion. These misleading and evasive statements initiate a mental mechanism where the inference, insinuation, and innuendo impersonate as fact. A partial list of hedging and weasel words is presented in Appendix 1 .

• Experiments in the laboratory may cause artificial …
• Although the results seem to support previous findings …
• This discrepancy could be attributed to …
• It is possible that an increase in postoperative …
• It is likely that the experimental group …
• Various mechanisms might be the cause of …
• The number of patients will probably increase …
• Rates are generally high …
• Occurrences of higher concentrations were lower at higher levels of effluent outflow.
• The evidence suggests that …

Trusting truthiness coming from your gut is subscribing to something less than the truth. Hitchens's razor asserts that what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Or the equivalent Latin proverb quo gratis asseritur, gratis negatur — what is freely asserted is freely dismissed. Words and expressions that are conditional, vague and undefined, introduce doubt, are imprecise, hedge and weasel, masquerading as facts. Hedging and using weasel words avoid being forthright, suggesting validity to an unproven statement or claim or an almost answer when it is actually inconclusive, vague, or outright wrong. Sentences with weasel or hedging words create their own biases and truthiness. These are mental bubbles and manipulating filter edits of writing that make scientific discourse suspect and unreliable. Caveat lector — let the reader beware.

Appendix 1.

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Writing Without Conviction? Hedging in Science Research Articles

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KEN HYLAND, Writing Without Conviction? Hedging in Science Research Articles, Applied Linguistics , Volume 17, Issue 4, December 1996, Pages 433–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/17.4.433

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Hedging is a well-documented feature of spoken discourse as a result of its role in qualifying categorical commitment and facilitating discussion Its use in academic writing has received less attention, however, and we know little about the functions it serves in different research fields and particular genres Hedging is a significant communicative resource for academics since it both confirms the individual's professional persona and represents a critical element in the rhetorical means of gaining acceptance of claims Hedges allow writers to anticipate possible opposition to claims by expressing statements with precision, caution, and diplomatic deference to the views of colleagues Based on a contextual analysis of 26 articles in molecular biology, this paper argues that hedging in scientific research writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from social and institutional contexts and suggests a pragmatic framework which reflects this interpretive environment

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Hedging in Scientific Discourse: Comparative Analysis of English and Russian Traditions in Academic Writing

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• Irina Avkhacheva   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6599-7783 11 ,
• Natalia Nesterova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9064-6742 11 ,
• Olga Protopopova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6165-6941 11 &
• Olga Soboleva   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1152-5454 11  

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• International Perm Forum Science and Global Challenges of the 21st Century

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The article addresses the issues concerning the comparative analysis of hedging techniques used by Russian and English-speaking authors in their research papers. The starting point of considering the problem is the fact that English has become the globally accepted language of communication in the academic environment and, in particular, when it comes to publishing research papers in the international peer reviewed journals. Given there are established traditions of the English language academic discourse that in many ways are not similar to those of the Russian-language science-orientated communication, Russian-speaking scholars, when writing their articles in English, are faced with the need to adhere to the stylistic and rhetorical conventions they are not used. One of the commonly recognized characteristics of the English-language scientific discourse is its noticeable non-categorical tone which is achieved due to a variety of hedging techniques actively used by the native English speakers. The analysis of publications written by the native English speakers gives grounds to consider hedging as an essential element of English-language academic discourse, which is not often the case with Russian research writers. Undertaken here, the comparative analysis of hedging techniques used by Russian and English-speaking authors is based on the articles on electrical engineering.

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Avkhacheva, I., Nesterova, N., Protopopova, O., Soboleva, O. (2022). Hedging in Scientific Discourse: Comparative Analysis of English and Russian Traditions in Academic Writing. In: Rocha, A., Isaeva, E. (eds) Science and Global Challenges of the 21st Century - Science and Technology. Perm Forum 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 342. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89477-1_52

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Talking to the Academy: Forms of Hedging in Science Research Articles

1996, Written Communication

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies which qualify categorical commitment, expressing possibility rather than certainty. In scientific writing hedging is central to effective argument and the rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims, allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and anticipate possible objections. Because they allow writers to express claims with precision, caution and modesty, hedges are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains nor the particular functions it serves in different genres. This paper identifies the major forms, functions and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.

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Applied Linguistics

Hedging is a well documented feature of spoken discourse as a result of its role in qualifying categorical commitment and facilitating discussion. Its use in academic writing has received less attention however and we know little about the functions it serves in different research fields and particular genres. Hedging is a significant communicative resource for academics since it both confirms the individual’s professional persona and represents a critical element in the rhetorical means of gaining acceptance of claims. Hedges allow writers to anticipate possible opposition to claims by expressing statements with precision, caution and diplomatic deference to the views of colleagues. Based on a contextual analysis of 26 articles in molecular biology, this paper argues that hedging in scientific research writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from social and institutional contexts and suggests a pragmatic framework which reflects this interpretive environment.

Iulian Boldea

This article focuses on the positive and negative consequences of the widely used rhetorical strategy of hedging in scientific research articles. On the one hand, appropriate hedging allows academic writers to introduce knowledge claims in the Discussion sections of research articles with caution and modesty in order to avoid denial, promote writer-reader interaction and thus facilitate the acceptance of new claims in today’s highly competitive academic environment. On the other hand, hedging was criticized as being a sign of excessive caution and academic cowardice that may potentially lead to ambiguity, absence of genuine writer-reader interaction and lack of commitment. Given the numerous pragmatic functions assigned to hedging, it is ultimately individual, linguistic, socio-pragmatic, disciplinary and cultural factors that influence the interpretation of hedges by the target readers as members of specific discourse communities.

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Introduction: The aim of this study is to investigate the process of rewriting medical research papers for the lay public. The latest findings of medical research often appear in the popular media. It is interesting to see what happens to a scientific text when it is transmitted to a new audience. Hedging is usually interpreted as a characteristic feature of scientific discourse. This study focuses on hedging, which also tends to be applied in popularized articles in the field of medicine. Material and method: Five medical research articles on prenatal vitamins and their online popularizations were examined by means of a text analyzing software, focusing on lexical items considered as hedges. The frequency and the overall percentage of hedging devices with respect to the total number of words were recorded in the five popularizations. Results: The results of the present study suggest that the linguistic strategy of hedging is applied in popular articles. Approximators, auxiliaries, ...

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In the context of academic writing, authors tend to mitigate the force of their scientific claims by means of hedging devices in order to reduce the risk of opposition and minimise the face threatening acts that are involved in the making of claims. This study explores the phenomenon of hedging in the research article (RA) from a cross-cultural perspective. To this end, a total of 40 RAs written in English and Spanish in the field of Clinical and Health Psychology were analysed in terms of the frequency of occurrence and distribution of the various strategies and the linguistic devices associated to each strategy which perform a hedging function in the different structural units of the articles. The results of the comparative quantitative analyses revealed that there are similarities between the two languages regarding the distribution of hedges across the structural units of the RAs, although a certain degree of rhetorical variation was also found mainly in terms of the frequency of use of the strategy of indetermination (i.e. modality devices and approximators) which occurs to a much greater extent in the English texts. This suggests that the English RAs in the field of Clinical and Health Psychology, as a whole, involve more protection to the author’s face.

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Knowledge International Journal

Ivaylo Dagnev

In linguistics, the word “hedge” has the meaning of &quot;mitigating&quot;, “reducing the power of expression”. It was Brown and Levinson [1], who, based on Goffman&#39;s work [2], [3], introduced the concepts of “Positive Face” and “Negative Face”. The latter is the need for an individual not to be interrupted, while the former is the desire to be liked and approved by others (Goffman, 1967). Hedging, from a theoretical point of view, is a form of the author&#39;s Ethos and identity, their degree of presence in the text. It also suggests that there may be factors in language interaction that make it possible for the sender&#39;s message to be perceived as a &quot;threat&quot; - for example, when using the English personal pronoun &quot;YOU&quot; in summarizing, the recipient can subconsciously associate themselves with the referrer of the personal pronoun. Given that scientific hypotheses are proven or refuted in RMA, it is quite natural for the authors to resort to different strat...

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