Hedging strategies: a comparative study between Brazilian Portuguese and English

• Autor(a) principal: Schepers, Bruna Milano
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Entretextos
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/entretextos/article/view/30346
• topic: Hedges; Academic writing; Corpus Linguistics; Transfer.; Hedges; Escritura académica; Linguística de corpus; Transferencia

This work aims at describing the use of hedging strategies in research articles written by Brazilians in Portuguese and in English and articles written by North American natives in English, and the possible linguistic transfers from their mother tongue. After a theoretical study of the academic writing and a brief explanation about the genre research article, we present some definitions of hedges, as well as their uses and functions in academic texts. Secondly, we describe the methodology based on the principles of Corpus Linguistics. The analyzed corpus consists of 30 research articles: 10 written in Brazilian Portuguese, 10 written in English by native speakers of Portuguese and 10 written in English by North American native speakers. The analysis and discussion of the data were based on the taxonomies proposed by Hyland (1998, 2000). The results showed some differences in the two corpora written by Brazilians in relation to the native English corpus, which may indicate possible transfers between languages. This work, therefore, contributes to the area of specialized text studies, as well as to the area of contrastive studies and the teaching of languages for specific purposes.