Hedge Analysis in Ferdowsi Annotated Academic Language Corpus: A Comparison of the Fields of Humanities and Science

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Atiyeh Kamyabi Gol ¹
• Elham Akhlaghi ²
• Hanieh Habibi ³

¹ Department of Persian Language and Literature and Department of linguistics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

² Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

³ Department of Translation Technology, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

10.22067/jlkd.2021.68589.1012

Abstract

A corpus consists of natural continuous texts that are presented electronically and from which information about linguistic elements (both lexical and non-lexical) can be extracted; this can be done in the shortest possible time and with the highest degree of accuracy. The authors of this article have created Ferdowsi Annotated Academic Language Corpus and the purpose of this article is to introduce the corpus of faculty members of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and use it in analyzing and describing hedges in both fields of humanities and science. Hedges indicate the certainty of the author through words such as "maybe", "possibly" and "definitely". Research in this area has mainly focused on manual analysis of limited number of words. In this study, Salager Meyer’s (1997) classification has been used to identify, and categorize hedges. The data were extracted from Ferdowsi Annotated Academic Language Corpus which contains 1100 Persian language articles. Based on the results, the use of hedges in the field of humanities was about twice as much as in the field of science. Meanwhile, the use of conditionals and expressions of doubt in both fields had a high frequency. The results from this study have a better chance at being generalized to the fields under study due to the greater number of entries. The accuracy of the corpus labeling is 96% and it can be used as an excellent source for analysis and research on scientific texts.

Keywords

• Corpus
• Scientific-research articles
• Persian language
• faculty members
• Hedges

20.1001.1.20087233.1399.12.2.9.3

Main Subjects

• Computational linguistics

---

Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights. This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

References

• افشین، فهیمه. و استاجی، اعظم. (1390). برررسی کاربردشناختی عبارات احتیاط­آمیز در مقالات علمی پژوهشی فارسی. پژوهش‌های زبانی. (۲)۲. ۱۷- ۳۶.
• دانشکار آراسته، پویان. (1381). نرم­افزار تشخیص فعل در زبان فارسی. (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی ارشد). تهران: دانشگاه علامه طباطبایی.
• دوگانی، شادی. (1391). بررسی عبارات صوری احتیاط در هفت سوره قرآن (در چارچوب هایلند). (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی ارشد زبانشناسی). مشهد: دانشکده ادبیات و علوم‌انسانی دکتر علی شریعتیدانشگاه فردوسی مشهد.
• شرفی، زهرا. (1390). بررسی کاربردشناختی عبارات احتیاط­آمیز در گفتار زنان و مردان فارسی­زبان. (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی ارشد زبان­شناسی). مشهد: دانشکده ادبیات و علوم‌انسانی دکتر علی شریعتی دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد.
• طباطبایی‌لطفی، سید عبدالمجید؛ قاسمی، طاهره. و سادات‌طباطبایی، مهین. (1398). مقایسه مراحل در چکیده­های مقالات رشته­های علوم‌انسانی و پایه/ پزشکی طبق مدل دادلی­ایوانز. زبان­پژوهی دانشگاه الزهرا، (30) 11. ۹- ۳۰.
• علوی­نیا، سید مجید (1390). تحلیل کاربردی عبارات احتیاط­آمیز و تشدید­کننده در مناظره­های تلویزیونی ریاست جمهوری ایران و امریکا. (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی­ارشد). اهواز: دانشکده ادبیات و علوم­انسانی دانشگاه شهید چمران.
• فرخ، ماندانا. (1381). بررسی ساختمان افعال ساده و مرکب فارسی و تدوین روش­های سرواژه­سازی به کمک رایانه، (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی ارشد). تهران: دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد تهران مرکزی.
• ممبینی، پگاه. (1392). بررسی عبارات موضع­نما در نقد کتب مجلات: مقایسه میان­رشته­ای زبان­شناسی کاربردی و فیزیک. (پایان­نامه منتشرنشدة کارشناسی ارشد). اهواز: دانشکده ادبیات و علوم‌انسانی دانشگاه شهید چمران.
• Abdi, R. (2002). Interpersonal metadiscourse: An indicator of interaction and identity. Discourse Studies, 4, 139–145.
• Atai, M. & Sadr, L. (2008). A cross-cultural genre study on hedging devices in discussion section of applied linguistics research articles. Teaching English language and literature, 7(2), 1-22.
• Behnam, B., Naeimi, A. & Darvishzade, A. (2012). A comparative genre analysis of hedging expressions in research articles: Is fuzziness forever wicked. English Language and Literature Studies, 2(2), 20-38.
• Clemen, G. (1997). The concept of hedging: origins, approaches, and In R. Markkanen, & H. Schröder (Eds.), Hedging and discourse: Approaches to the analysis of a pragmatic phenomenon in academic texts (pp. 235-249). Berlin: Werner Hildebrand.
• Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
• Dousti, M. & Eslami Rasekh, A. (2016). ELT students’ gender differences in the use of hedges in interpersonal interactions: A mixed method approach applied. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 3(1), 217-231.
• Falahati, R. (2004). A contrastive study of hedging in English and Farsi academic discourse [Unpublished Master’s thesis], University of Victoria.
• Fraser, B. (2010). Pragmatic competence: The case of hedging. In G. Kaltenboeck, (Ed.), New Approaches to Hedging (pp. 13-34). Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
• Gardner, D. & Davies, M. (2013). A New Academic Vocabulary List. Applied Linguistics.
• Hashemi, M. R. & Shirzadi, M. (2016).The use of hedging in discussion sections of applied linguistics research articles with varied research. The Journal of Teaching Language Skills (JTLS),35(1), 31-56.
• Hassani, M. T. & Dastjani Farahani, M. (2016). A discourse analysis of gender differences in the use of hedging devices in applied linguistics research articles. English Language Teaching, 1(1), 59-73.
• Hyland, K. (1995). The author in the text: Hedging scientific writing. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Teaching, 18, 33-42.
• Hyland, K. (1996a). Writing without conviction? Hedging in scientific research articles. Applied Linguistics, 17(4), 433- 453.
• Hyland, K. (1996b). Talking to the academy: Forms of hedges in science research articles. Written Communication, 13(2), 251-28.
• Hyland, K. (1998a). Hedging in scientific research articles. John Benjamins: Amesterdam.
• Hyland, K. (1998b). Boosting, hedging and negotiation of academic knowledge. Text, 18(3), 349- 382.
• Hyland, K. (2000). Hedges, boosters and lexical invisibility: Noticing modifiers in academic writing texts. Language Awareness, 9(4), 179- 197.
• Hyland, K. & Tse, P. M. (2004). Meta discourse in academic writing: A reappraisal. Applied Linguistics, 25(2), 156-177.
• Jadidinejad, A. H., Mahmoudi, F. & Dehdari, J. (2010). Evaluation of PerStem: A simple and efficient stemming algorithm for Persian, in workshop of the cross-language evaluation forum for European languages. Springer, 98-101.
• Jalilifar, A. (2006). All the way through the hedges: A corpus analysis of hedges in research articles. Paper presented at 7^th Iranian conference on linguistics, Tehran, Iran.
• Jalilifar, A. (2007). Hedging as a pragmatic strategy: Variations across disciplines and cultures. TELL, 1(3), 43-69.
• Khallash, M. & Imany, M. (2014). Hazm: Python library for digesting Persian text. [cited 2015; Available from: https://github.com/sobhe/hazm.
• Kong, C. C. K. (2006). Linguistic resources as evaluators in English and Chinese research articles. Multi lingua, 25, 183–216.
• Manshadi, M. (2015). Farsi Verb Tokenizer. [cited 2015; Available from: https://github.com/mehdi-manshadi/Farsi-Verb-Tokenizer.
• Marti´n, P. & Burgess, S. (2004). The rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts. Text, 24, 171–195.
• Millan, E. L. (2008). Epistemic and approximative meaning revisited: The use of hedges, boosters, and approximators when writing research in different disciplines. In S. Burgess, P. Marti´n-Marti´n. (Eds.), English as an Additional Language in Research Publication and Communication ( 65–82). Bern, Germany: Peter Lang.
• Sahragard, R. & Yazdanpanahi, S. (2017). English engagement markers: A comparison of humanities and science journal articles. Language Art, 2(1), 111-130.
• Soodmand Afshar, H., Moradi, M. & Hamzavi, R. (2014). Frequency and type of hedging devices used in the research articles of humanities, basic sciences and agriculture. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 36, 70-74.
• Sarabi, Z., Mahyar, H. & Farhoodi, M. (2013). ParsiPardaz: Persian language processing toolkit. Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE), 3rd International Conference on IEEE, Mashhad, Iran.
• Rezaie, M. & Takii, S. (2014). Hedging expressions in English and Persian MA and PhD theses: The case of Iranian learners. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(20), 2339- 2349.
• Samaie, M., Khosravian, F. & Boghayeri, M. (2014). The frequency and types of hedges in research article introductions by Persian and English native authors. Science Direct, 98, 1678 – 1685. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.593
• Salager Meyer, F. (1994). Hedges and textual communicative function in medical English. English for Specific Purposes, 13(2): 149- 170.
• Salager Meyer, F. (1997). I think that perhaps you should: A study of hedges in written scientific discourse. In T. Miller (ed.), Functional approaches to written texts: Classroom applications (pp. 127–143). Washington: ERIC.
• Sedaghat, A., Biria, R. & Asadi A.Y. (2015). Cross cultural analysis of hedges in Persian and English editorial columns. International Journal of Language Learning and Applied Linguistics World. 8(1), 37-50.
• Seraji, M., Megyesi, B. & Nivre, J. (2012). A basic language resource kit for Persian. Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), European Language Resources Association. Istanbul, Turkey.
• Shamsfard, M. (2011). Challenges and open problems, Persian text processing. 5th Language & Technology Conference (LTC),
• Shamsfard, M., Jafari, H. S., & Ilbeygi, M. (2010). STeP-1: A set of fundamental tools for Persian text processing. Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), European Language Resources Association. Istanbul, Turkey.
• Varttala, T. (2001). Hedging in Scientifically Oriented Discourse. Exploring Variation According to Discipline and Intended Audience.
• Vold, T. E. (2006). Epistemic modality markers in research articles: A cross linguistic and cross-disciplinary study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(1), 61-87.