The Use of Hedges and Boosters in English-Language Scientific Articles of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Abstract

This paper is aimed at revealing the question about using hedges and boosters, lexico-grammatical discourse items that promote regulations of proposition force – within anglophone scientific discourse of the late 19th – early 20th century. The relevance of the research is determined by the increased interest of modern linguistics in discursive units, including hedges and boosters, which play a significant role in scientific discourse, regulating the author’s ideological presence in the text of the work, contributing to maintaining contact between the authors of texts and their readers, as well as reflecting the author’s subjective position on the discussed issue. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that it is for the first time to perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the units mitigating and reinforcing the utterance in scientific articles by anglophone authors of the late 19th – early 20th century. The research material includes articles from the field of applied linguistics, theory of pedagogy, theoretical anthropology and applied astrophysics. The articles analysed were written between 1887 and 1914. The total number of hedges and boosters identified by the continuous sampling method was 3916 language units, of which 41.1 % were defined as hedges and 58.9 % as boosters. The results of empirical analysis show that boosters and hedges, being important tools for regulating the power of utterance, were actively used by anglophone authors in scientific publications of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The more frequent usage of boosters can be explained by the scientific traditions of that period. Due to a number of reasons (the relatively small number of published articles, the absence of strict requirements regarding article structure and length), the authors of scientific papers positioned themselves more as real experts in their field of knowledge, expressing their subjective thoughts very unambiguously and confidently.