a study of hedging in persian academic papers

the present paper studies hedges in persian academic papers. hedging has an important role in academic discourse; in fact it is a device expressing a writer's degree of certainty or doubt about a proposition. in this study, a collection of 114 academic papers (57 papers in the field of chemistry and 57 papers in the field of persian literature) have been analyzed. the results show that the distribution of hedges in chemistry and persian literature papers are different. hedging is more frequent in literature papers; this is due to the different nature of reasoning in the two fields. as for the different kinds of hedges, in both fields adverbs are the most frequent and adjectives are the least frequent hedges.