The Use of Hedging Devices in English and Persian Abstracts of Persian Literature and Civil Engineering MA/MS Theses of Iranian Writers

The present study compared and contrasted the frequency of incidence of hedges in 40 MA/MS abstracts of Persian Literature and Civil Engineering theses written both in Persian and English against the taxonomy of hedges proposed by Salager-Meyer (1994). Running Chi-square analyses, it was found that, firstly, there were no significant differences in the frequency of incidence of hedges used in the abstracts written both in English and Persian in both disciplines and secondly, discipline had no effect on the frequency of incidence of hedges. Thirdly, Iranian graduate students made relatively lower use of hedges compared with their English speaking counterparts. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.