Commitment and detachment in English and Bulgarian academic writing

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Abstract

The paper examines similarities and differences in the degree of commitment and detachment in English, Bulgarian and Bulgarian English research articles in linguistics. The analysis shows considerable differences in the overall distribution of hedges and boosters throughout the three main parts of the article, namely the Introduction, Discussion and Conclusion, which may lead to misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication. The particular linguistic devices employed in the three languages are also investigated. Reasons for preference for one or another device are suggested; special attention is paid to certain differences in the pragmatic function of formally similar items. The variations are related to the different rhetorical and educational traditions in order to further facilitate the teaching of academic writing in English to Bulgarians, but also to appeal for a better understanding and tolerance of culture-specific features with a view to preserving cultural identity when using English as the international language of academic communication.

Section snippets

Aim of the study and theoretical preliminaries

One of the frequently discussed issues in the field of contrastive academic rhetoric is the degree and expression of commitment and detachment on the part of the author towards the proposition (for a comprehensive overview of Contrastive Rhetoric see Connor, 1996), which is only understandable, as recent research has shown that various languages and writing traditions exhibit considerable variation in this respect, which may lead to cross-cultural misunderstanding and endanger scientific

Corpora

The corpus is built from texts in English, Bulgarian and Bulgarian English (60 pages in each language). The articles are published in leading international and Bulgarian journals and collections of articles and are chosen for their comparability and homogeneity in terms of genre (academic research articles) and field (linguistics). The main reason for selecting this particular area of academic discourse is motivated by my desire to include a corpus of data from articles written by Bulgarians in

Methodology

Holmes (1984) identifies two basic strategies for modifying the illocutionary force of speech acts which reflect various degrees of commitment and detachment: boosting (increasing the illocutionary force) and attenuation (decreasing the illocutionary force). It is interesting to note here (although difficult to explain why) that attenuation, or hedging, as the phenomenon is more frequently termed, has attracted much more attention, including the contrastive perspective, compared to boosting

Overall distribution

The overall distribution of the hedges and boosters is summarised in Table 1 in percentages.1

As can be

Conclusion

To sum up, apart from the most general similarities in the three types of texts, namely the very fact that all of them employ hedging (hedging in academic writing is not favoured by some other cultures — see for more details Bloor & Bloor, 1991) and that they use approximately the same linguistic means of expressing hedging and boosting, many more differences are observed. To begin with, Bulgarian and especially BE show a higher degree of commitment and hence — a lower degree of deference

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