Grammatical Metaphor in Academic Writing: Focusing on Nominalization and Verbalization

The Low Co-occurrence of Nominalization and Hedging in Scientific Papers Written by Chinese EFL Learners

“…Specifically, hedging is defined as a strategy or technique to soften the magnitude of the language and enhance acceptability of readers (Nikula, 1997), and hedging can also function as face-saving strategy as well as making things less fuzzier (Lakoff, 1972). Up to now, there have been correspondent corpus-based quantitative studies dedicated to the usage of nominalization or hedging in scientific papers both in China and abroad (Chen &Wen, 2020;Liardét & Black, 2020;Park, 2019;Liu & Chen, 2019;Yoon, 2018;Prasithrathsint, 2014), yet very few corpusbased statistical analyses have been conducted with respect to their possible co-occurrence in academic discourse.…”