Epistemic modality across academic disciplines: the phraseology of epistemic verbs
(2018) BAAHE 2018 — Location: Mons, Belgium (30.November.2018)
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- Authors
Larsson, Tove 
- Abstract
- Epistemic modality is inherent in academic prose (Swales, 1990) and typically expressed through hedging and boosting devices (e.g. through adverbs such as probably and strongly and verbs such as seem and demonstrate, respectively). Academic disciplines have, however, been shown to differ in the way these devices are used. The soft sciences are said to use hedges and boosters more often than the hard sciences, as the former are more discursive in nature and often rely on the “explicit recognition of alternative voices” (Hyland, 2011: 205). The hard sciences, by contrast, are mostly based on cumulative knowledge and often minimize the role of the author (ibid.). While the frequency and functions of these devices have received considerable attention (e.g. Hyland, 1998; Takimoto, 2015), few studies have looked into their phraseology across disciplines. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at how hedging and boosting devices are used across academic disciplines, so as to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced description of their use in context. For the purpose of this study, we focus on a set of epistemic verbs found to be typical of academic prose (Biber, 2006), viz. seem, believe, show and demonstrate, and map out their phraseological patterns through an analysis of co-occurrence (collocations) and recurrence (lexical bundles). To do so, we use a 60-million-word sub-component of the CAJA corpus (Kozem, 2010) containing 22 disciplines from the hard and soft sciences. Both the analyses of co-occurrence and recurrence are performed using Sketch Engine (Kilgariff et al., 2004). The results show that there is a general trend for the hard and soft sciences to show different practices, which is in line with previous research. For example, the soft sciences generally use the verbs under focus in a wider variety of phraseological patterns than the hard sciences. This finding confirms the tendency of the soft sciences to show more variation with regard to degree of commitment to the propositional content. However, at the same time, the results also lead us to question the clear-cut distinction often made in the literature between the hard and soft sciences. The results indicate that there can also be overlap between the disciplinary groups (e.g. clearly demonstrate is frequent in medicine but also in history) and intra-group diversity (e.g. believe is particularly frequent in philosophy). The paper will end with some suggestions for improving the treatment of hedges and boosters in EAP teaching.
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Larsson, T., & Schutz, N. (2018). Epistemic modality across academic disciplines: the phraseology of epistemic verbs. BAAHE 2018, Mons, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/57033