Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge

Abstract

This article explores the role of doubt and certainty in published research articles from eight academic disciplines. Drawing on a computer corpus of 56 research papers and interviews with expert informants, I identify the principal means by which academics modify their statements and the functions such modifications perform in negotiating knowledge claims in a range of areas of intellectual inquiry. The quantitative results reveal the importance of hedges and boosters in academic writing and their wide disciplinary variability. The analysis shows that these devices are responsive to the understandings of social communities, and that their use is one of the systematic means by which academics collabora]te to both socially create knowledge and construct their disciplinary worlds. The paper therefore suggests that these differences in rhetorical practices are related to the fact that academics construct knowledge as members of particular disciplinary communities and that their discoursal decisions are influenced by, and embedded in, the epistemological and interactional conventions of their disciplines. © Walter de Gruyter.