Hedges and boosters in L2 (Czech) Master's theses and published research articles: A contrastive analysis

This article studies the use of lexical hedges and boosters in English-medium Master's theses by L2 (Czech) graduates in English language and literature programmes. Drawing on the metadiscourse framework and adopting a corpus-based approach, the study analyses the frequency, realisations, and function of hedges and boosters in a corpus of 48 Master's theses in linguistics, literature, and education. The results are also compared to a reference corpus representing L1 English published academic discourse in the same disciplines. The analysis shows that the Master's theses of Czech students use fewer hedges and slightly more boosters than L1 expert writers and thus display a somewhat less cautious stance. The results also indicate that Czech graduates show a strong preference for content-oriented hedges and emphatics as boosters. This suggests that the rhetorical choices of Czech graduates bear features of learner discourse and may be affected by the merging of L1 and L2 academic conventions and the power relations between the student-writer and the examiners inherent to the Master's thesis. Based on these findings, the article draws some implications for L2 writing pedagogy.