The above discussion on attribution hedges in Chinese academic discourse provides both theoretical and empirical findings about authorial stance and use of rhetorical options in academic discourse. Regarding the distribution of the first type of hedge—explicit reference to previous research, it was surprising to find that it did not always emerge as a major device. Of the three disciplines, business writers employed a significantly higher proportion in the use of such a hedge. The relatively lower incidence in pure humanities articles of this type of attribution may be due to their preference for other attribution hedges, in particular, personal attribution. The small
number of uses in biology articles, on the other hand, may be a result of the general avoidance of attribution hedges in this field.
The second type of hedge—attribution to assumed common knowledge—is not found in English academic discourse. Chinese writers in the pure humanities, in particular, demonstrate a strong preference for this hedge. When authors refer to a generally held truth, they involve the readers in their reasoning process with expressions like women zhidao ‘as we all know’ or zhong suo zhou zhi ‘as known to all’. The use of we not only reflects an author’s subjective evaluation but also expresses an intention to build solidarity with readers in the academic community (Vladimirou 2007:151). Biology writers demonstrate an objective stance and detached attitude by never referring to commonly held perceptions to support their arguments.
In fact, even in personal attribution, biology authors never use ‘we’ to refer to themselves. Business writers display a style that approximates to that of biology writers, i.e. only a small number of arguments are supported by commonly held knowledge. Involvement of readers and the obscurity of an individual presence may well be attributed to the concepts of harmony maintenance (Hinkel 1994:373) and
“collectivism” (Chen 2007:227, Chang 2011:89), which are highly valued in the Chinese society and are therefore particularly salient in Chinese academic writing.
The next type of hedge—personal attribution—had the highest rate of occurrence of all attribution hedges in the pure humanities and business articles. By stating beliefs or speculation, authors demonstrate greater individuality by making reference to their own viewpoint to justify their claims. Two major linguistic types of personal attribution were identified: pronominal self reference and non-pronominal self-reference. Pronominal reference includes the first person singular and first person plural pronouns. A sizeable proportion of such hedges took the form of first person pronouns among the soft sciences writers. While the subjective account was more pronounced among writiers in the pure humanities in that ‘I’ is exclusively used by writers in this field, business writers are more moderate in making personal references.
That is, even in articles written by single authors, they use women ‘we’ to downgrade the agent involvement and qualify the strength of their claims. Biology writers tend to signal an intent to “de-personalize” themselves (Berman 2005:105) with bizhe/zuozhe
‘the author’ for self-reference, which indicates a lesser degree of individuality.
Impersonal pronominal reference is also used as a major type of attribution hedge.
Writers in the three disciplines, in the pure humanities, in particular, often express uncertainty about the specific referent associated with a given proposition. All the Chinese writers in our databank prefer the indefinite pronoun mou ‘certain’ to agentless passives when they hedge about the identity of a referent/entity or the exact quality of a certain concept/idea.
In general, the results and discussion so far show that writers in different disciplines display varying styles in their attribution hedges, with the pure humanities articles demonstrating the greatest tendency for more subjective accounts when seeking support for their claims. Business writers display a more variant style in the distribution of different hedges. Although significant disciplinary variation is mainly found in their attribution to previous research, there was a high proportion of first person pronouns in the business writing compared to the non-presence of such personal attribution in the biology writing (cf. Table 5). In fact, according to the information presented in Table 4, the means of personal attribution in the business writing was much closer to that of the writing in the pure humanities. This finding partially supports the observation (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984) that authors in soft knowledge disciplines express greater subjectivity and personal involvement in their writing whereas social sciences writers demonstrate a lesser degree of subjectivity.
Given these results, we may place the three fields of study on a subjectivity scale, with the pure humanities situated toward the subjective end and the hard sciences (i.e.
biology) on the objective end, and the social sciences located in between:
pure humanities social sciences hard sciences subjectivity objectivity
Figure 1. Degree of subjectivity/objectivity in authorial stance
The features of reader involvement and the establishment of solidarity either by use of first person pronouns or attribution to widely held knowledge have generally been noted in spoken discourse (Brown & Levinson 1987). This suggests that writing in the pure humanities has a rhetorical style closer to interactively oriented spoken register. The incorporation of more informal and interactive elements may arise from the uncertain nature of studies in the pure humanities, where claims or propositions are mainly based on subjective evaluation or interpretation of information. When scientific evidence is not readily accessible, writers involve readers in the process of argumentation to alleviate the force of the subjective claim. For writing in biology, hedging devices are used sparingly, and this implies a stronger objective authorial stance. The lack of more subjective attribution could be due to the more scientific nature of the subject of biology research, which requires authors to avoid individuality (Vassileva 1998:178) and speculation when experimental evidence is insufficient.
5. Conclusion
Attribution hedges have been used by speakers and writers to qualify the strength of their claims or arguments by attributing information to a given source. In this study, we have explored attribution hedges in Chinese academic discourse by analyzing 90 research articles in the pure humanities, social sciences and hard sciences.
Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed both intra-disciplinary variations and inter-disciplinary variations. Writers in the the pure humanities tend to follow rhetorical patterns to build solidarity with readers and to display their subjective stance. Writers in the social sciences also take on an evaluative tone that is subjectively oriented, though to a lesser degree. Hard sciences writers demonstrate their objective authorial stance, detachment and avoidance of individuality that are characteristic of academic writing. As there have been few studies exploring attribution hedges used by Chinese writers, the findings reported in this study provide an important reference for both research in Chinese academic discourse and for teachers in the pedagogy of Chinese academic writing.
There are some remaining issues which await future research. Due to the limit of time, we only included journals published in Taiwan. Furthermore, owing to limited e-resources of well-established journals written in Chinese, we chose the fields of biology, business, and the pure humanities. In our business data, we included journals in the fields of economics, finance, and management. However, some researchers may not consider management as a social science. Also, there may be variations in the use of hedges among different disciplines within a broad academic field, e.g. variations might exist among different subfields (Hernández Guerra & Hernández Guerra 2008).
These issues are worth further investigation to obtain a more comprehensive picture of how attribution hedges and other hedges are used in Chinese academic discourse.
Appendix: Journals used in this study
Pure humanities:
New History
Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy
Bulletin of the Department of History of National Taiwan University
Business/Social science Journal of Financial Studies Taiwan Economic Review Journal of Management
Biology/Hard science
Taiwanese Journal of Agricultural Chemistry and Food Science Formosan Entomologist
Plant Protection Bulletin
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[Received April 10, 2012; revised July 19, 2012; accepted August 15, 2012]
Department of English
National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, TAIWAN
Miao-Hsia Chang: [email protected] Yu-Wen Luo: [email protected] Yueh-Kuei Hsu: [email protected]