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A Corpus-Based Study of Epistemic Modality Markers in Chinese Research Articles

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7717))

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Abstract

Research on the use of hedging strategies in research articles has received increasing attention. This paper presents a pilot study of a corpus-based study of epistemic modality markers(EMMs) in Chinese research articles. We first study the use of EMMs in Chinese research articles in linguistics, medicine and aerospace, and then compare their frequency use in research articles of Chinese, English, French and Norwegian, with the data for the other three languages from Vold(2006)’s study. The findings are: 1) disciplines will not affect the frequency use of EMMs in Chinese research articles; 2) culture affects the frequency use of EMMs significantly and Chinese research articles are more heavily hedged than the western ones in the sense of statistics. Chinese research articles are characterized by low uncertainty avoidance.

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He, Y., Wang, H. (2013). A Corpus-Based Study of Epistemic Modality Markers in Chinese Research Articles. In: Ji, D., Xiao, G. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7717. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36337-5_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36337-5_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36336-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36337-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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