Metadiscourse Use in Popular and Professional Science: The Case of Hedges and Boosters

The present article shows that all scientific texts included in journals, magazines, and newspapers are vulnerable to the penetration of hedges and boosters.  However, it was found that scientific texts in the three corpora tended to open up the possibilities of alternative voices rather than narrowing them down. The relatively higher frequency of occurrence of hedges in comparison with boosters indicates that regardless of whether the audience is expert or non-expert, their voices are seen as respected in the scientific texts. Similarly, boosters as means of narrowing down the alternative positions and developing a strong and certain authorial voices are equally disfavored in both expert and popularized scientific texts. Despite this similar pattern of the use of hedges and boosters in the investigated corpora, the means to achieve the mentioned objectives slightly differed and the informal style of language use dominating popular genres influenced the textual realizations of such functions.