Abstract:
Epistemic modality devices are believed to be one of the prominent characteristics of research articles as the commonly used genre among the academic community members. Considering the importance of such devices in producing and comprehending scientific discourse, this study aimed to cross–culturally and cross-linguistically investigate epistemic modality markers as an important subcategory of hedges in linguistics research articles. To this end, three corpora of research articles written by Anglo-American and Iranian writers in English and Iranian writers in Persian were examined. The frequency occurrences of the markers were counted functionally. The data were analyzed using Mann-Whitney tests. The findings revealed that there were significant differences between all three corpora with respect to the total relative frequency of epistemic modality markers. That is, native English texts contained the highest proportion and native Persian texts included the lowest proportion of epistemic modality marker, and non-native English texts were placed in between. Furthermore, the statistical analysis of the data for each category of epistemic modality markers showed that the text groups differed significantly in containing some specific categories, but not the others. The possible interpretations of the results as well as some implications of the study have been discussed.
Machine summary:
Keywords: cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation, epistemic modality markers, Persian/English, research articles 1 *Corresponding Author, English Department, Chabahar Maritime University, Email: Khoshsima@cmu.
More specifically, the present study is to analyze research articles with respect to the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of authors and their impact on the application and distribution of epistemic modality markers as a vital and prominent rhetorical strategy.
In other words, it aims at exploring the possible similarities and differences between the research articles written by English native, Persian native, and Persian EFL writers in terms of using epistemic modality markers.
Sameri and Tavangar (2013) worked on a corpus of English and Persian research articles consisting of two sub-corpora of hard and soft sciences written by three groups of writers with different linguistic and/or cultural background.
Additionally, as it is believed that disciplinary factor plays an important role in writers’ making use of epistemic modality markers as rhetorical paradigms in their text (Vazquez & Giner 2008; Vold 2006), the present study has chosen to work on one scientific discipline, that is, linguistics on which, to the best knowledge of the researchers, has not been worked before in Persian language.
Accordingly, this paper is to report a study on the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in the employment of epistemic modality markers as one type of hedging devices in research articles.
2. Are there any significant differences among the three corpora (NE, NNE, and NP texts) with respect to the frequency use of the subcategories of epistemic modality markers; that is, modal auxiliaries, modal verbs, modal adverbs, and modal adjectives?