The Frequency of Hedging Cues in Citation Contexts in Scientific Writing

Abstract

Citations in scientific writing fulfill an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure that is intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations within the argumentative context in which a citation is placed. To determine these relations automatically in scientific writing, we have suggested that stylistic and rhetorical cues will be significant. One type of cue that we have studied is the discourse cue, which provides cohesion among textual components. Another form of rhetorical cue involves hedging to modify the affect of a scientific claim. Hedging in scientific writing has been extensively studied by Hyland, including cataloging the pragmatic functions of the various types of cues. In this paper we show that the hedging cues proposed by Hyland occur more frequently in citation contexts than in the text as a whole. With this information we conjecture that hedging cues are an important aspect of the rhetorical relations found in citation contexts and that the pragmatics of hedges may help in determining the purpose of citations.