Traditional thinking in applied linguistics held that academic texts are characterized by clarity, brevity and accuracy in meaning realization. However, it has long been found that hedges, or fuzzy terms, exist ubiquitously in academic writings. The present thesis presents a corpus-based study of hedges in academic texts. The corpus used in the research is JDEST (Jiao Tong University Corpus of English for Science and Technology), developed by linguists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with about 4 million running words. On the basis of a critical review of previous studies, a working definition of hedge is proposed and a formal categorization is made according to different grammatical categories. A special category of chunked hedges is also discussed. Then the pragmatic functions of hedges are explored in detail. The study has found that hedges constitute an integral part of academic texts, performing the functions of sustaining reliability, achieving objectivity and accuracy and saving face. After that, the functions of hedges are analyzed in greater detail by situating them under the specific context of the three separate discourse sections of the research articles. Finally, conclusions are made and some pedagogical implications of the present study are proposed.
