A Corpus-Based Small-Scale Study of the Self-Mention Word “We” And Hedges Word “Can” And “Might (Published)
This article focused on study self-mention word “we” and hedges words “can” and “might” by using corpus-based analysis method. The results were found that the self-mention word “we” is more used in business research articles than in medical research articles, and the study also found that the business research articles written by Chinese speakers prefer to use the word “we” more often than native English speakers. In addition to that, native English writers of medical research articles prefer to use the hedges word “can” rather than “might”, which could show assertiveness and objectivity.
Keywords: Hedges word, Stance Corpus, self-mention