Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

The interactional nature of academic discourse has been analyzed in linguistics literature from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly conducted on English materials. Little is known of how interactional metadiscourse elements are used in Russian academic prose and what diachronic changes in metadiscourse have occurred in the last decade. Building on previous research that suggests cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and diachronic differences in the use of hedges in academic prose, this paper explores functional categories of hedges used in Russian research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the functional realization of hedging, since it may be expected that it could change over time. The study was conducted on a corpus of 112 linguistics research article abstracts published in four Russian journals in two periods (2008-2014 and 2015-2021). To investigate hedging devices and their functional categories, this study employed quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis indicated that in the first period (2008-2014) hedging was most frequently realized through modals, reporting verbs, and quantifiers. In the second time span (2015-2021), reporting verbs, epistemic verbs, and adjectives of probability were among the most frequent functional categories of hedging. Overall, the distribution of functional categories of hedging changed in the second period when hedging was realized through a variety of lexical means belonging to different functional categories. In terms of the functions of hedging, the difference was also striking. In the first time span, hedges were employed to diminish an authorial presence in the text, while in the second one authors hedged to point toward possible methodological limitations and to signal inaccuracies of research results. Despite some data limitations, this study could be seen as a starting point for future research of metadiscourse in Russian-language academic prose from cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural or diachronic perspective.