HEDGING DEVICES

IN WRITTEN DISCOURSES: SAMPLES FROM

INDONESIAN ACADEMIC TEXTS

Safnil

Abstract: Hedges play an important role and function in writing particularly in academic or scientific texts. Authors of academic texts often use hedges for various purposes, such as to prevent a conflict with readers or minimization of face threatening act (FTA), softening the illocutionary force of a text or protect proposition components of a text. For Indonesian linguists and applied linguists, hedges are probably still new and therefore there have been adequate studies on this topic especially in the Indonesia, academic texts. This study is an attempt to investigate what kind of hedges or hedging words are used in an Indonesian research article introduction. The analysis results show that the hedging devices used in Indonesian academic or scientific texts are not very different from those used in the English texts except the use of noun in the Indonesian texts which may not be common in the English texts. This may suggest that the Indonesian speakers who write academic texts in English, as far as the use of hedging devices are concerned, will not find great difficulties and neither will the English speakers who write academic texts in Indonesian as far as they are already familiar with the use of hedging devices in their first languages.   
 

Key terms: hedging devices, academic text, FTA, illocutionary and syntactic form.

info lebih lanjut hubungi:

Email: vidyafkip@yahoo.com