Hedging and Boosting in Turkish MA Theses’ Conclusions

Authors : Ruhan Güçlü

Pages : 17-54

View : 80 | Download : 84

Publication Date : 2024-01-09

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This study aims to reveal how the authors of Turkish master’s theses construct hedges and boosters in the conclusion sections. To this end, the corpus of this study is comprised of a total of eighty conclusion sections of Turkish master’s theses in social sciences and humanities based on Hyland’s (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse. The analysis of the study reveals that the authors boost their statements with the use of amplifiers, modal suffixes indicating certanity, emphatics, universal pronouns and hedge their statements with deploying pronouns, epistemic lexical verbs, epistemic adjectives, epistemic adverbs and epistemic modal suffixes. Various types of boosters and hedges, especially the frequent use of modal suffixes could be attributed to the agglutinative nature of Turkish language. Moreover, the overall use of hedges and boosters appeared with similar frequencies which resulted in confidently uncertain language use. The insights gained from this study make noteworthy contributions to our understanding of Turkish MA theses’ conclusions about metadiscourse use. As metadiscourse markers are teachable, this study will provide useful insights for researchers aspiring to write theses, teachers of Turkish as a foreign language and for future Turkish metadiscourse studies, pointing to the awareness of language-specific lexicogrammatical realizations of metadiscourse units.
Keywords : Kaçınmalar, Güçlendiriciler, Yüksek Lisans Tezlerinin Sonuç Bölümleri, Sosyal Bilimler ve Beşeri Bilimler, Üstsöylem