한국언어과학회

This study was to examine how L2 writers from different disciplines construct stance markers such as hedges or boosters in research article abstracts. A total of 180 English research article abstracts were collected from the disciplines of applied linguists, public administration, business, computer science, electronic engineering, and biology. Hedges and boosters were analyzed based on the taxonomy proposed by Hyland(2005) and Hu and Cao(2011). The findings revealed that the disciplines of soft sciences contained more stance markers than hard sciences. The discipline of applied linguistics contained the highest proportion of hedges, whereas the discipline of biology contained the highest proportion of boosters. Considerably fewer hedges and boosters were found in the electronic engineering corpus. The most frequently used type of hedges and boosters was epistemic lexical verbs. The analysis suggests that discipline-specific writing conventions should be considered in L2 academic writing instruction. Studies on variations across disciplines may provide pedagogical implications for L2 academic writing courses.