Russian lexical and syntactic hedges in dissertation reviews

Abstract

The author analyzes Russian lexical and syntactic hedges as a rhetorical strategy for mitigating the negative evaluation of the reviewed research. The relevance of the study is due to the ongoing attempts to reconceptualize the nature of academic discourse, which is increasingly viewed both as an interactive space and an information environment. This approach determines the need to study metadiscourse as an effective strategy for constructing a harmonious dialogue between the reviewer and the author of the dissertation under review. The purpose of the study is to identify lexical and grammatical categories of hedges and their rhetorical functions in the thesis reviews. A corpus of 90 dissertation reviews published on the websites of Russian dissertation councils in 2019-2022 was used as research materials. The object of the study was the genre of a dissertation review, where for the first time the linguistic means of mitigating negative evaluation on two linguistic levels were identified. This determines the scientific novelty of this study. To analyze the lexical and syntactic realizations of the hedging strategy, the methods of quantitative and interpretive analysis were used. The quantitative analysis revealed that the hedging strategy is mainly verbalized with the help of verbs, adverbs and introductory constructions. The interpretive analysis showed that hedges perform a wide range of communicative functions: shifting the communicative focus; modal mitigation of criticism; deintensification. The research contributes to linguistics disciplines such as pragmalinguistics, text theory and discourse analysis. The prospects of the research are an analysis of lexical and grammatical categories of other metadiscursive strategies.

Keywords

• academic discourse
• dissertation review
• hedging
• negative evaluation
• softening
• russian syntactic construction
• russian lexical item
• modality