Linguistic hedges in scientific articles on humanities

Purpose. By using a corpus of 120 Russian scientific articles on humanities the study analyzed linguistic actualizers of hedging as a metadiscourse strategy contributing to the efficient communication between an author and a reader. The novelty of the study is determined by scarcity of metadiscourse studies on articles in Russian, while it is relevant due to the ongoing attempts to re-interpret the nature of academic discourse, which has been considered as an interactional rather than informational space. This approach determines the need to study linguistic tools that help to construct an efficient dialogue with the reader and present research results in a way that is appropriate in the scientific community. The study aims to reveal lexical and lexico-syntactic hedges and determine their frequencies and functions in the corpus of scientific articles on humanities.Results. It was demonstrated that hedging is an integral part of academic discourse, where it mitigates the categoricalness of author’s claims by de-intensifying features under consideration, shifting the communicative focus to the emotional state or subjective nature of author’s opinions, indicating the non-absolute nature of his statements, or presenting the statements as possible ones.Conclusion. The analysis revealed hedging to be a crucial component of effective author-reader interaction, mitigating categorical statements and conveying a nuanced understanding of the research issue. Adverbs and verbs were the most prevalent lexical hedges, while introductory constructions played a significant role in the lexico-syntactic category. These findings emphasize the importance of hedging in creating a collaborative academic discourse space.