A cross-cultural study of indirectness and hedging in the conference proposals of English NS and NNS scholars

Use of an appropriate degree of indirectness and hedging is critical in effective scientific academic writing (Hyland 1995). However, perceptions of appropriateness in indirectness and hedging are claimed to be culture-specific, even sometimes causing socio-pragmatic failure in intercultural communication (Hyland 1995; Thomas 1983). Despite the importance of the issue, not much is known about what constitutes an appropriate degree of indirectness in academic discourse and to what extent it differs across cultures (Hinkel 2005). The present study, therefore, investigates whether cross-cultural differences exist in the use and functions of indirectness and hedging devices in a corpus of 120 conference proposals written by Indian, Japanese, Turkish (NNS), and Anglo-American (NS) scholars. Hinkel’s (1997, 2005) categorization of indirectness and hedging devices served as the framework for the analysis. The analysis included thirteen types of indirectness and hedging devices under three major headings as rhetorical devices (i.e. disclaimers and denials, vagueness and ambiguity markers), lexical and referential markers (i.e. hedges, point of view distancing, downtoners, dimunitives, discourse particles, demonstratives, indefinite pronouns), and syntactic markers (i.e., passive voice, if conditionals). The data were subjected to statistical analysis first by employing Kruskall-Wallis test to compare the three NNS groups in terms of the frequencies of indirectness devices (IN-TR-JP). Then, Mann–Whitney U test was used for paired comparisons similar to Hinkel (1997), first between each NNS group (IN-TR, IN-JP, JP-TR) and then between English NS and each cultural group (NS-IN, NS-JP, NS-TR). After the statistical analysis, the functions of the indirectness devices that differed across groups were also examined. The results indicate significant differences across the cultural groups in both frequencies and functions of various indirectness/hedging markers. While NS and Indians used few instances of indirectness devices, Turkish and especially Japanese scholars preferred higher frequencies of indirectness and hedging devices in their proposals. The results indicate that these significant cross-cultural variations in hedging and indirectness in the genre of conference proposal may be cultural, thus may cause problems for international scholars such as Indian, Japanese, and Turkish scholars in their attempts to be accepted and disseminate their work in international conferences as their proposals can be perceived as either too direct or indirect. The results are also striking because as opposed to most previous contrastive rhetoric or intercultural communication studies that often portray Western texts (especially Anglo-American) as direct as opposed to Eastern texts as indirect and hesitant, the present study found significant differences even among texts of scholars all largely from Eastern cultural backgrounds. This result, therefore, call simple assumptions and overgeneralizations regarding Western and Eastern cultural styles into question. Further discussions on the results and implications for further research and pedagogical applications will be provided.