Transferência de estratégias de hedging : um estudo contrastivo entre o português brasileiro e o inglês

Abstract

This work aims at describing the use of hedging strategies in research articles written by Brazilians in Portuguese and in English, and the possible transfers from their mother tongue. After a theoretical study of the academic writing and a brief explanation about the gender research article, we present some definitions of hedges, as well as their uses and functions in academic text by native speakers or by non-native speakers. Secondly, we describe the methodology based on the principles of Corpus Linguistics. To this end, we selected a corpus of 30 research articles: 10 written in Brazilian Portuguese, 10 written in English by native speakers of Portuguese and 10 written in English by North American native speakers. The analysis and discussion of the data were based on the taxonomies proposed by Hyland (1998, 2000). The results showed some differences in the two corpora written by Brazilians in relation to the native English corpus, which may indicate possible transfers between languages. This work, therefore, contributes to the area of specialized text studies, as well as to the area of contrastive studies and the teaching of languages for specific purposes.