Contrastive Analysis of Hedges in English and Persian Linguistics Articles

contexts and also in scientific research articles (RAs). The academic writers construct texts to make social relations with their readers. These expressions are used in academic writings to present findings with caution and modesty, and leave more rooms to readers for negotiation. The present study was conducted to examine the hedging phenomenon in English and Persian linguistics research articles (RAs) based on Varttala (2001) and Hyland (1996, 2000) taxonomies. In so doing, a corpus of 20 research articles including Persian and English were selected from Iranian and international journals in the field of linguistics as soft science published. The findings of this study indicated that the frequency of hedging forms in conclusion sections of Persian RAs is more than English RAs. Hedging can get different functions and have direct influence on stating the writer s claims, too. In this study also, two main functions which consist of writer-oriented and accuracy-oriented were investigated. Accuracy-oriented hedge is divided into attribute and reliability hedges. The frequency of writer-oriented and reliability hedges in conclusion sections of English RAs is more than Persian. However, the frequency of attribute hedges in Persian RAs is more than English RAs