APPROXIMATION AS A LINGUISTIC HEDGING TACTIC IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: INTERLINGUAL ASPECT

Abstract

Despite the attention paid to linguistic hedging, researchers have not focused on the ways in which these strategies are implemented in various academic texts. Therefore, our comparative study aims to identify the common and distinctive characteristics of the approximation tactic as one of the hedging strategies in academic discourse. We selected sentence constructions from scientific texts of the same volume, particularly from abstracts of academic articles in the field of humanities, in order to analyze them and draw objective conclusions about the implementation of the approximation tactic. The analysis included an equal amount of text from English and Ukrainian academic journals. The analysis was based on texts of 20,000 characters in each language, and a corpus of sentence structures of 300 units in each language was formed. Through the work of earlier researchers and the author's analysis, several communicative techniques of approximation tactic were identified, including uncertain number, generalisation, restriction and analogy. A comparative analysis revealed differences in the implementation of the highlighted techniques. Based on our observations, generalisation is the most common method of actualising the approximation tactic in English academic discourse, accounting for 37% of language samples. In contrast, the most common method in Ukrainian discourse is the use of the uncertain number technique, which accounts for 37% of the language samples. The use of analogy is equally common in both English and Ukrainian contexts, accounting for 15% and 16% respectively. However, the use of restriction occurs more frequently in English discourse (23%) than in Ukrainian discourse (16%). These identified trends reflect both linguistic and cultural traditions of academic language.