Hedges and boosters in English and Italian medical research articles: A cross-cultural comparison

Writers of academic papers generally use a wide range of strategies when they expose scientific argumentations or take a stance that can potentially threaten readers’ face. Hedging and boosting devices are rhetorical devices that help authors mitigate or enhance the impact of their positions and claims on readers. This study seeks to explore the role and the frequency of hedging and boosting in scientific articles from a cross-cultural perspective. Our goal is to compare English and Italian research papers to describe hedging and boosting strategies and check whether they differ between the two languages in terms of frequencies and functions. To do that, we have collected a bilingual corpus made up of 58 medical research papers in Italian and English, investigated through quantitative and qualitative methods. Our findings demonstrate that targeting an international audience dramatically increases the frequency of the hedges, and in particular the category of reader-oriented hedges.