A Contrastive Study of Hedges in English Theses for M.A. Degree

The study ventures to probe into the incidence of hedges in the conclusion part of English theses on the basis of carefully chosen samples, two self-compiled English theses corpora, namely, the Corpus of Native English Speakers (CNES) and the Corpus of Chinese English Learners (CCEL). The findings clearly indicate that hedges used in CCEL shares some similarities with those in CNES, but the differences between them outweigh the similarities. This paper aims to raise Chinese EFL students' awareness of hedges and improve their skills in thesis writing.