Cross-Cultural Variation in the Use of Hedges and Boosters in Academic Discourse

of persuasion in academic discourse as they enable academic writers to distinguish
facts from opinions, evaluate the views of others and convey a diff erent degree of
commitment to their assertions (cf. Hyland 1998a, Hyland 2004, 2005).  is study
explores cross-cultural variation in the use of lexical hedges and boosters in the academic
discourse of non-native writers.  e study is carried out on a specialized corpus of
linguistics research articles published in the international journal Applied Linguistics
and the national Czech English-medium journal Discourse and Interaction.  e
main purpose of the cross-cultural investigation is to analyze variation in the rate,
distribution and choice of hedges and boosters across the rhetorical structure of research
articles in order to shed light on ways in which Anglophone and Czech writers express
diff erent degrees of commitment in their assertions when striving to persuade their
target readership to accept their views and claims.