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Indonesian Literature Analysis

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writers. Indonesian writers, particularly in the Engineering discipline, hardly utilise might for hedging. Might is assumed to signal greater degrees of uncertainty than may to express probability (Hyland 1998b: 118). Hence, a possible cause for the low number of might in the research articles is that the writers are reluctant to use device which greatly weakens their stance.
4.2.3. Verbs
The use of hedges in the form of verbs is less consistent than the modal verbs across the subcorpora. While the British engineers, British applied linguists and Indonesian applied linguists utilise verbs at a similar rate with respectively 343, 337, and 314 tokens, Indonesian engineers only use 189 hedging verbs in their articles.
Due to their similar …show more content…

Vassileva 2001; Hu & Cao 2011), accept more tentativeness in their research articles while Indonesian academics prefer to be more certain by assuming that the assertions have been exhaustively researched through the use of tend. The high frequency of tend in the articles in the L2 corpus, however, cannot be generalised without detailed observations. As can be seen in Figure 4.6., there is a case in which tend is used numerous times (18 occurrences) in one single text from the Applied Linguistics discipline, making the text appear judgemental. Figure 4.6. Hedge Overuse Case 1
There are also hedging verbs which frequencies seem to be affected by discipline differences. The obvious example is estimate, which is highly used in Engineering but infrequent in Applied Linguistics. Estimate is used to predict mostly numbers; example (13) suggests that the exact value cannot be stated.
(13) The study estimated an 11% potential for improvement on the performance of the newest kilns in use (BrEng01)
The frequent use of estimate is most likely because the Engineering discipline has the closer characteristics to hard science, which incorporates more quantitative studies relying on analysis of numerical data (Becher and Trowler 2001: 36).

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