HEDGING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ARTICLES -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1. On Hedging and Hedges -- What is hedging? -- What is a hedge? -- Why study scientific hedging? -- A brief background to hedging -- Purpose and methodology -- 2. Towards a context of scientific hedging -- Empirical and rhetorical models of scientific writing -- Research writing as social action -- Rhetorical features of research articles -- Disciplinary culture and rhetorical context -- 3. Perspective and hedging in discourse -- Linguistic approaches to hedging -- Hedging in academic writing -- Knowledge claims and scientific truth -- Knowledge claims and audience design -- Knowledge claims and writer commitment -- Conclusion -- 4. Theoretical and methodological considerations -- Scientific claims in the construction of knowledge -- A characterisation of hedging in scientific RAs -- Data selection and description of the corpora -- Method of analysis -- 5. Surface Features of Hedging -- Lexical and strategic hedges -- Modal auxiliaries -- Epistemic lexical verbs -- Epistemic adjectives, adverbs and nouns -- Hedging numerical data -- Non-lexical hedges -- Distributional information -- Conclusion -- 6. A pragmatic analysis of hedging -- A polypragmatic model -- Content-oriented hedges -- a) Accuracy-oriented hedges -- b) Writer-oriented hedges -- Reader-oriented hedges -- Hedging in scientific writing -- 7. Examining hedges in scientific discourse -- Extract 1 : Hedging in an introduction -- Extract 2: Hedging results -- Extract 3: Hedging a controversial claim -- Extract 4: Hedging a research article -- Some comments on the interpretations -- 8. Hedging and second language learners -- Hedging in L2 students' academic writing -- Advice from the style guides -- Hedging in ESP textbooks.

Teaching ESP students to hedge -- Conclusion -- 9. Conclusions and Implications -- Some principal issues of hedging -- Hedging in science: proposing some answers -- Some implications -- Conclusions and directions -- Notes -- 1. On Hedges and Hedging -- 2 Towards a context of scientific Hedging -- 3. Perspective and Hedging in Discourse -- 4. Theoretical and Methodlogical Considerations -- 5. Surface Features of Hedging -- 6. A Pragmatic Analysis of Hedging -- Appendix: Corpus of journal articles. -- A: Photosynthesis Research -- B: FEBS Letters (Journal of The Federation of European BiochemicalSocieties) -- C: Biochimica et Biophysica Acta -- D: The Plant Cell (Journal of The American Society of PlantPhysiologists) -- E: Plant Physiology -- F: Plant Molecular Biology -- References -- Index.