CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF HEDGES USED IN ARTICLES ON ROBOTICS

The appropriate use of hedges manifests the author's professional competences and helps to develop the relationship with the reader and join the scientific community. Various languages display considerable variations in the use of hedges, which may bring about cross-cultural misinterpretation and hinder scientific communication. The corpus of 45 articles on robotics written by Russian, Chinese and American researchers was compiled. The hedges, selected from the articles, were analyzed with the help of the concordance program. The percentage of hedges used in abstracts, introductions and conclusions was computed and comparative analysis was performed. The list of hedges which are generally used in scientific papers on robotics was compiled. The results suggest that though the difference in the percentage of hedges employed is minor, American authors tend to use more hedges and give preference to certain hedges in their writings. Despite the fact that academic writing in English is developing throughout the world, we face the influence of national academic writing traditions. The researchers willing to establish cross-cultural scientific communication should be able to understand the nature and functions of hedges employed by authors from different countries and correctly use them in their own writings. The results of the present study would be helpful to academic writing teachers as well as to researchers who publish their papers in English. (C) 2020 Published by European Publisher.