Commitment and detachment in English and Bulgarian academic writing
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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