Hedges in academic writing are drawn attention by scholars. Hedging devices enable writers to express their uncertainty con-cerning the factuality of their statements or to indicate deference to their readers. In this paper,ten English linguistic academic articles written by Chinese scholars were chosen for the study. Hedges were categorized to four types. The analysis showed the total number of hedges per category in all articles. The results indicated that modals/probabilities and semi-auxiliaries or epistemic verbs were preferred by Chinese linguists. It is suggested that for non-native English speakers mastery of hedging devices is requisite in their graduate programs.
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