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УДК 316.776.33
Т. И. грибанова
старший преподаватель кафедры грамматики и истории английского языка факультета английского языка Московского государственного лингвистического университета; e-mail: tigribanova65@yandex.ru
ХЕДЖИРОВАНИЕ В АНглОяЗЫЧНОМ МЕДИЦИНСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ (на материале научно-исследовательских статей)
В работе рассматриваются особенности употребления хеджирующих средств в письменных текстах медицинской тематики. Анализируются основные разделы научно-исследовательской статьи с точки зрения их прагматической направленности, определяются наиболее типичные для данного типа текста средства хеджирования, выявляется зависимость их выбора от специфики структурных разделов медицинской научной статьи.
Ключевые слова: хедж; хеджирующее средство; научно-исследовательская статья; медицинский дискурс; компенсационные тактики.
T. i. Gribanova
Senior Lecturer, Department of Grammar and History of English, Faculty of the English Language, Moscow State Linguistic university; e-mail: tigribanova65@yandex.ru
hedging iN English medical research articles
The present article considers the problem of hedging in English written texts belonging to medical discourse. The major sections of medical research articles are analyzed in terms of their pragmatic value. Various hedging devices typical of the texts under investigation are traced, which enables the author to establish interrelation between a hedge used and the specificity of the structural section of the medical research article.
Key words: hedge; hedging device; research article; medical discourse; mitigation.
Introduction
Hedges have long been in the focus of linguistic analysis (Lakoff, Brown, Levinson, Tarantino, Prince et al, Swales, Лебедева / Грибанова). The present paper discusses hedging in English written texts belonging to medical discourse. The analysis of ten articles from leading medical journals provided data on the functioning of different hedging devices in the major sections of medical research articles, namely, Introduction, Methods,
Results, Discussion. The qualitative and quantitative study focuses on the interrelation between the linguistic means used and the communicative purpose of the corresponding section. The hedges selected were grouped according to the pre-established categories. The most frequent means proved to be shields, approximators and compound hedges, their frequency being over 90 % of the total number of the devices under investigation.
The language of modern scientific description is a combination of accuracy and understatement, speculations made need to be apologized for [Jalilifar 2011]. As a consequence, researches are required to tone down their statements by means of various linguistic means. The existing viewpoints on the hedge usage in scientific discourse are based on different approaches to the reasons underlying the employment of hedges.
The most widely accepted point of view defines hedges as 'linguistic cues of bias' [Fand 1989:315], thus making the statement more tentative and decreasing the risk at negating it. Precision is not always necessary as every communicative act presupposes the use of strategies to minimize the threat to face [Brown and Levinson 1978; Skelton 1988; Geyer 2008; Riekkinen 2009]. The use of downtoned statements enables the author to avoid embarrassing situations and protect his reputation as a researcher.
The pragmatic value of hedges can be regarded as means for honest and modest self-reporting, caution creating your niche among other researchers [Hyland 2008]. Also, hedging can be discussed in terms of positive or negative politeness strategies [Brown and Levinson 1978; Geyer 2008], as devices aimed at establishing social interactions, such as avoiding direct criticism, deference towards the scientific community, etc. [Salager-Meyer 1994; Riekkinen 2009].
The other viewpoint on the role of hedges in academic writing considers them as means to present scientific claims in a more precise way, negotiating their more adequate reporting [Tarantino 1991; Trang and Duong 2013]. A true researcher is aware that what (s)he is exploring is just another step on the way of advancing the state of knowledge under investigation. Thus, hedges are more than a "cover-up" tactic, it is rather a "resource to express scientific uncertainty, skepticism, and doubt" [Skelton 1988]. In fact, a scientist is always balancing between the desire to be precise and the impossibility to achieve this aim.
Medical research papers as part of scientific discourse at large are often viewed as highly precise, reporting data in a most accurate way. However,
claiming precision in medical writing is not always necessary, which results in the use of various mitigating language means. We can't but agree with Skelton who wrote that "with a hedging system language is rendered more flexible and the world more subtle" [Skelton 1958, p. 38].
Traditionally, a medical research article (RA) is structured into the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, each section characterized by its own pragmatics.
The difference in communicative purpose allows us to hypothesize different distribution of hedging elements across the sections mentioned above.
The material for analysis was drawn from leading medical journals such as The British Medical Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Lancet, Archives of Internal Medicine, The New England Journal of Medicine, published between 2010-2019. The number of RA analyzed is 10 (making up 8562 running words).
The particular tasks set for the research were as follows: to trace most typical hedging devices in medical research articles; to analyze hedges from the point of view of their frequency and taxonomy; to establish interrelation between a hedge chosen and rhetorical value of the RA structural section.
In order to identify hedges accurately and avoid mixing them up with language units without mitigating effect a close contextual analysis was carried out.
The typology of hedges taken for the present research is based on formal and functional criteria. Functionally, the hedges were grouped into:
• shields1: plausibility shields - modal verbs (may, can, would, etc.), epistemic verbs (suggest, speculate, appear, seem, etc.), cognition verbs (believe, suppose, think, etc.), adverbs (probably, likely, etc.), attribution shields (according to, as far as anyone knows, etc.);
• approximators: adaptors (sort of, kind of, somewhat, etc.); rounders (almost, about, approximately, etc.).
Plausibility shields modify the degree of uncertainty, while attribution shields show that the author's words are acquired via information received from other people.
Unlike shields, approximators affect the truth conditions of the proposition: to talk about less representative members of a category the
1 For the subdivision of hedges into shields and approximators see [Prince et al. 1982, p. 90].
author uses adaptors; to talk about measurements, when precision is not relevant, the researcher turns to rounders.
Structurally, the hedges under analysis are used singly or as compounds ( i.e. compositions of different hedges). Compound hedges can be double
(It may suggest that...), treble (It would seem likely...), quadruple (It would seem somewhat unlikely ...).
Methodology
The research is carried out within the following trends of modern linguistics: functional grammar, discourse analysis, comparative analysis, mitigation theory.
Results and Discussion
The observations made contribute to giving answers to the questions related to the tasks set in the Introduction:
1) What are the most frequent hedging devices in RA?
2) What is the hedge distribution across the RA sections?
3) How are the results obtained relate to the pragmatics of each section?
4) What is the functional potential of hedges in English medical RA?
1. Overall Frequency of Hedging Devices in Medical Research Articles
The linguistic data collected provide evidence about the most frequent hedge group subjected to analysis: shields proved to outnumber approximators (74 % and 26 %, respectively). Among the shields used, the distribution is as follows: plausibility shields (49 %), attribution shields (25 %). The plausibility shields subgroup is represented by modal verbs (20 %), epistemic verbs (15 %), cognition verbs (12 %) and probability adverbs (2 %).
• Small samples may have hindered the interpretation of many studies.
• Epidemiological studies have suggested that obesity is also associated with increased risk of several cancer types.
• We believe the metabolic syndrome plays an important role in carcinogenesis.
• The breast tissue of overweight women had more cytologic abnormalities, probably due to increased endogenous exposure to estrogen rendering the breast susceptible to estrogen - induced DNA damage.
About 40 % of the total shields usage is compound hedges.
• These dysfunctions might be slightly overestimated.
• It seems reasonable to assume that high glucose levels and increased concentration of plasma C-peptide are associated with increased colorectal cancer risk.
Approximators (26 %) are represented mostly by rounders (21 %).
• A pooled analysis of data from eight prospective studies indicated that breast cancer risk of postmenopausal women increased approximately by 18 % per 5 kg/m2 increase in body mass index.
The frequent use of shields (especially modal verbs) in RA provides support to the finding that modals are typical of scientific discourse to tone down the information presented and to modulate the degree of certainty on the author's part [Tarantino 1991].
2. Distribution of Hedges Across Section in Research Articles
The most hedge-marked RA section in the material under investigation proved to be Discussion. Compare: Discussion (67 %), Introduction (21 %), Results (9 %) and Methods (3 %). This may be due to the fact that RA authors often pretend to universalize their results, and, as a consequence, have to tone down their statements, first and foremost, within the Discussion section aimed at making most claims about the research findings.
Being close in its pragmatics to the Discussion section, Introduction also provides examples of hedge usage, the most frequent plausibility shield in Introduction being epistemic verbs (18 %).
Approximators in RA Introduction often take the form of negative and quasi-negative rounders.
• Few data exist on the effects of weight gain or weight loss on altering the treatment response.
• Little information exists on the frequency and severity of the disorder.
• The mechanism, by which the negative complications in BMI are reduced
remain uncertain.
This can be explained by the fact that Introduction is to justify the reason for the study, as well as to give evidence to question the existing viewpoints on the subject of the analysis.
The use of attribution shields in this section relates to the necessity of quoting other studies on the issue in question. This allows the writer to provide arguments to support his/her own research, yet implying the idea of its incomplete character. As a result, the reader, being exposed to the contrasting views presented in Introduction, feels ready to accept the author's ideas concerning the unexplored within the research area.
The Methods section is the least hedged part of RA (3% of all the hedges used). This can be accounted for by its communicative purpose (to describe the ways the data were obtained, to list the procedures and principles underlying the study), and its status as an example at highly explicit and rigid type of academic writing.
The total number of hedges in the Methods section is 15 occurrences -10 approximators (rounders) and 5 shields (probability adverbs).
• A large prospective population, based study of almost 900,000 US adults was carried out.
• Obesity is probably a major risk factor in several types of cancer.
The rounders in this section contribute to presenting information in a general way without irrelevant precision.
The Results sections of RAs prove to be poor in hedging devices (9 % of all the hedges traced in RA). The reason for their low frequency lies in the functional specificity of this RA division. The section serves as a quite clear and straightforward presentation of results, description of experiments and tests, and makes few claims about the data obtained. As for the hedge distribution, it basically resembles that of the Methods section: in Results approximators (53 %) also prevail over shields (47 %), though the difference in frequencies is not significant.
However, the subgroups of shields in the Results and Methods sections differ. Compare: Results are mostly hedged by modal and epistemic verbs, while Methods - by probability adverbs.
It is noteworthy to remark that most hedges in the Results section are traced in the author's evaluative commentaries of the results rather than in the results description proper. This is indicative of the researchers' desire to avoid absolute statements about their findings. Whereas facts are presented straightforwardly ('We discovered that...'), their interpretations and comments are generally subjected to doubt and careful reasoning.
The Discussion section develops the ideas given in Introduction, which results in similar hedge distribution, namely the prevalence of shields (74 %) over approximators (26 %), though the frequency difference in Discussion is more significant. Besides, as compared to Introduction, Discussion contains shields represented mostly by modal verbs rather than epistemic.
Discussion:
• This may also be the reason why a high BMI during adolescence was significantly associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer in men.
• The process of DNA sign thesis might also show thermotolerance.
Introduction:
• Clinical data suggest that severely obese patients.
• Primary pneumonia appears to be rarely complicated by respiratory failure.
The main rhetorical function of the Discussion section is making claims about the research carried out using non-statistical wording to comment on statistical data (which may account for the relatively low frequency of approximators) here. Moreover, this section presupposes the greatest variety of commentaries in RA, i.e. explanations, summarizing, making suggestions and conclusions, setting further questions in reference to future developments and applications of results. At the same time, it is most important to present findings so that the author's opinion shouldn't sound too strong. It is recommended to provide alternative explanations somebody else might suggest. This fact accounts for the frequent usage of compound hedges in this particular section.
• This appears to make it less likely that immunotherapy drugs will boost the body's disease - fighting capability.
• It seems quite reasonable to combine measles and measles vaccination together as a possible protective factor against leukemia.
• The findings also provoke questions as to whether strengthening the gut microbiome might help the immune system to fight cancer, an issue the ICL team now hope to explore.
Resorting to hedging devices, including compound structures, allows researches to find the golden mean between the acceptable degree of certainty and the desire to align themselves with their claims leaving room for possible disagreement on the part of the reader.
The use of approximators (rounders) in medical texts contributes to a certain compromise between the necessity of being accurate with numerical data and the requirement for mitigation.
A possible solution for the dilemma may be agreement upon a correspondence between numbers and their verbal expressions. For example, "almost certain" could correspond to "a 90 % chance", "possible" to "a 70 % chance", etc. [Salager-Meyer 1994].
Conclusions
The medical linguistic data subjected to analysis made it clear enough that the use of mitigating expressions is dictated by the discourse tendencies and requirements for this type of academic writing. Tentativeness and flexibility are characteristic features of English medical texts.
Another factor that determines the process of hedging in medical RAs is the structure of the article. The pragmatics, or rhetorical value, of the standard RA sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) contribute to the qualitative and quantitative distributions of hedging devices. The more hedge-marked sections are Discussion and Introduction while the less hedge-marked ones are Methods and Results. The most frequent hedging group across all the sections turned out to be plausibility shields (with focus on modal and epistemic verbs). Approximators generally took the form of rounders, adaptors being of extremely limited usage.
The compound hedges were mostly traced in the Discussion section due to its focus on claim and variability of its realization.
It is worth mentioning that the findings obtained contradict the traditional opinion about scientific (including medical) texts as highly precise, thus allowing no hedging devices. However, this is not always the case. Modern medical discourse is characterized by precision in reference to facts presented, but at the same time it is tentative and downtoned as for the manner of hypothesizing and summarizing information, making judgments and discussing the results of the research.
The present study demonstrates a three-dimensional nature of hedges in medical discourse: providing mitigation, vagueness, and tentativeness, they 1) help to realize threat-minimizing tactics; 2) contribute to the researchers' modesty and avoidance of arrogance, and 3) provide ways to escape unnecessary precision in estimating phenomena under investigation.
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