The use of hedges in research articles by Turkish interlanguage speakers of english and native english speakers in the field of social sciences

Studies relating to hedging phenomena have often been directed at the analysis of spoken interaction or at language use in general. However, especially from the mid-1980s onwards, the role of hedges in written discourse and particularly in academically and scientifically oriented language use has become a point of considerable interest for researchers.The study examines the instances of various kinds of hedges in the corpora compiled from research articles by native and non-native authors in hte field of social sciences and to determine whether or not variation exists between the two corpora under investigation in terms of occurence and functions of hedges. The questions of the research are:1. To what extent do native and nonnative speakers of English employ the same linguistic means of expressing hedging?2. Do native and nonnative speakers of English show variation as regards the frequency of the use of epistemic modality markers as hedging devices?3. What functional differences in the use of hedges do both corpora display?The study was conducted with 90 research articles written by Turkish inter-language speaker of English and native speakers in the field of social sciences. The corpora were analyzed through Word Smith tool.Keywords: Hedges, Linguistic Variation, Epistemic Modality Markers