The current study aims to analyze the distribution of hedging markers in academic texts written by Russian postgraduate students majoring in humanities and engineering. In exploring hedging from a cross-disciplinary perspective, this study employed quantitative and qualitative methods. Data were collected from 40 research proposals written by postgraduate students as an examination task. The results revealed that research proposals written by humanities students included more hedging devices than those produced by engineering students who did not tend to mitigate their claims. The low frequency of hedges in engineering research proposals might be explained both by discipline-specific writing norms and poorly developed language proficiency of engineering students.
|
