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Hedging, considered as a pragmatic phenomenon, is used for interpersonal communication. Most of the recent studies on academic discourse have focused the interpersonal aspect of hedging with a view of analyzing this strategy in relation to the communicative. situation and to explore its impact on the relationship between writer and reader. Hedging is a device by which “the author reduces the strength of what he is writing” (Zuck & Zuck, 1985:172), thus hedging is seen, functioning as an interpersonal politeness strategy to avoid disagreement “modify the writer’s responsibility for the truthfulness of an utterance” (Varttala, 2001: 14) and to signal a tentative or cautious assessment of the truth of the referential information” (Krismore & Kopple, 1988: 185). Different studies have signaled an array of linguistic devices which can be typically used as hedges. The main categories include for example: auxiliaries and semi auxiliaries, adverbs and adverbials, full verbs, impersonal expressions, agentless passives, modal verbs and the list has been broadened to prosodic and kinesics hedges. Modality, as a type of hedging, is one such device used to signal authors’ presence in academic writing to create an atmosphere of interaction between writer and reader, “a resource for taking up different positioning” (SimonVandenbergen & Aijmer 2007: 42) and a way to represent writer’s view point to the truth of the proposition. Modality generates space for negotiation between writer and reader and Abstract: Hedging is a pragmatic phenomenon which is practiced to signal interpersonal communication. In academic discourse, hedges are used to signal writers’ presence in a text. This article explores the use of hedges particularly with reference to epistemic and deontic modality markers—important and frequently used types of hedges-in Pakistani research dissertations belonging to three major disciplines: Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. The material is based on a special purpose corpus of Pakistani academic writing developed with 235 M.phil and PhD research theses. To find out the frequencies of modal verbs AntConc 3.5.6 was used. All the frequencies were listed and every 50th example was analysed using the theoretical distinction between epistemic and deontic modality outlined by Biber et al. (1999). Statistical analysis of the data reveals, that disciplinary affiliation has a considerable influence on the proportion of epistemic and deontic modality.

Hedging as an Indicator of Disciplinary Variation in Pakistani Academic Discourse: A Corpus Based Study