Hedges in English and Arabic Metadiscourse Utility in Academic Writing: A Contrastive Analysis

: This current study has increased the amount of studies on metadiscourse features in English and Arabic, as well as cultural groupings, by examining the usage of hedging in linguistic research articles published in English and Arabic. The technique was qualitative, with a corpus of 40 articles from six linguistics journals used. This study aimed to identify similarities and differences in the use of hedges in native English and native Arabic linguistics research publications. Hyland's taxonomy of metadiscourse markers was used to analyze the language categories. The contrastive analysis of English and Arabic in this article was a systematic investigation of language pairs to uncover differences and similarities. Arabic articles are not more dominant than English articles in the Hidges structure. The result showed that hedges in English is greater than in Arabic research articles. From those findings, it might have a substantial influence on the teaching and learning of Arabic as a foreign language


Introduction
Metadiscourse plays a vital role in academic contexts, notably writing. Writing is a social and communicative link between reader and writer, whereas metadiscourse is the primary means through which authors communicate with their audience. Metadiscourse contributes to the art of persuasion or rhetoric in three ways: it fosters logical appeals by directly connecting concepts and arguments, it reveals the writer's authority and expertise, and it shows respect by respecting the reader's point of view. Many metadiscourse scholars agree with this. The researchers have been studying metadiscourse and most studies have shown disparities in metadiscourse use across genres and languages. 1 The writers of metadiscourse argue that using it demonstrates the writer's involvement with the piece. Certain metadiscourse resources are used by writers/speakers depending on the goal and audience. 2 Research articles, which are the main vehicle for academic communication, instruction, and knowledge creation, benefit from metadiscourse because it helps writers develop a voice that strikes a balance between assurance and caution, fosters respect among colleagues, and seeks to locate propositions in the concerns and interests of the discipline. 3 From a comparative standpoint, in this study, the use of hedges was examined as a group of interactional metadiscourse strategies in the academic paper genre. Hedges are language devices used in communication to show ambiguity about the truth. 4 Stated hedging enables authors to convey a viewpoint on their remarks, deliver unverified claims with caution, and engage in discourse with their viewers. In English, hedges include: most likely, in general, maybe, and in a specific way. In Arabic, these linguistic techniques are known as rubbama (probably), ammatan (typically), min al-mumkini (possibly), and bi tariqa mu'ayyana (in a particular manner).
Contrastive rhetoric, which holds that language and writing are culturally located, has explored metadiscourse. A great deal of study has been conducted to test this theory, examining the employment of metadiscourse tactics in various language, cultural, or disciplinary groups. 5 English studies have not been featured in anthologies of contrastive rhetoric (various English linguistics), however, have performed substantial study on English contrasts. 6 In terms of Arabic-English contrastive studies, 7 study is particularly interesting, as it compares the use of validity markers and attitude markers in English and Arabic argumentative writing, comparing the use of these two categories of metadiscourse in native English and native Arabic student's argumentative essays, 8 Despite metadiscourse categories fluctuate in frequency and preferred forms 9 These categories typically emerge in the same situations to engage with texts in both native Arabic and native English, as well as across L1-L2 texts in each language, demonstrating their level of commitment to the text and attitude towards each other. 10 To compare and contrast the signs of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in 60 linguistics research papers (RAs) written in both languages. 11 He found that linguistic RAs in both English and Arabic place a lot of emphasis on metadiscourse markers. However, his findings imply that Arab authors have a penchant for overusing metadiscourse indicators.
Despite previous research's findings, there do not appear to be numerous attempts at contrastive English-Arabic metadiscourse usage. The goal of this project is to close a knowledge gap and advance our understanding of how interaction works in the English and Arabic languages as well as in English and Arabic cultural contexts. This study's main objective is to compare and contrast how hedges are used in linguistics research publications written in English and Arabic. The study seeks to determine how the use of hedges varies between RAs written in English and Arabic as well as how the readerwriter responsibility connection differs between texts written by native Arabic speakers and those written by native English speakers.

Methods
This research used qualitative method by using contrastive analysis text between Arabic and English texts. The data sources in this study were Arabic and English texts which were analyzed based on the characters of each language of the text. The purpose of the research, or contrastive analysis, is to identify distinctions and patterns in how Hedges is employed in Arabic and English texts. In this study, the data analysis used was contrastive qualitative analysis. The qualitative paradigm demanded data analysis carried out continuously throughout the research process, so that each step is interconnected. After successfully collecting primary and secondary data, the next step is to process the data, the data obtained were analyzed by contrastive theory between BI (Arabic) and B2 (English).   of knowledge or a level of confidence, for example: certainty, doubt, probability, or epistemic necessity.

Results and Discussion
Hedges is a term used in academic writing to indicate the idea of being cautious in one's words. It is used in a variety of linguistic ways to convey ambiguity and indirectness in sentence structure. Hedges is a very wide and interwoven notion. Its bounds encompass a wide range of linguistic areas. As a result, the hedges device is explored from a variety of perspectives in linguistics. In English, hedges is well known both in the form of concepts or expressions. Became a popular concept in English, such as Taqi, a researcher who thought to look for it and its linguistic tools in Arabic which is a very expressive language. Taqi conducted a comprehensive investigation of the grammar and linguistics texts of standard Arabic, and it was discovered that neither the notion of hedges nor the instruments are classified as hedges, as they are in English.
Furthermore, Taqi explained that the concept of hedges refers to the speaker's desire to be careful in conveying statements or words. He asserts that several reference materials in linguistic publications make note of techniques for expressing this idea. Hedges's forms are seen as being crucial in illuminating the speaker's perspective on other individuals or any issue under consideration. In order to convey uncertainty or the desire to look such in order to avoid commitment, the speaker is constrained in a specific way by this. English linguistic books classify this caution differently according to its perspective and whether it is single words or syntactic structures.
The issue, in Taqi's viewpoint, is that although the term "hedges" is often used yet classified in a variety of ways, Arabic linguistic publications do not give it much attention. They provide hedges, although not in the form of properly designated hedges.
In sum, Taqi gave the conclusion that hedges may be expressed in English using a variety of grammatical constructions all the way down to single words. Similar to English, Arabic has a variety of phrases that fall under the hedges idea's definition. Although The authors considered hedges to be an important thing to learn, especially in relation to writing scientific articles and also tried to analyze the use of hedges in writing scientific articles in English and Arabic. This section presented the frequency and percentage of use of hedges devices in Arabic and English. Here, we summarized these results according to the research objectives. Some of the findings in previous studies we quoted as an effort between previous research and the research that the author made.  Table 3 showed the quantitative analysis results. The statistics showed the overall number of hedge occurrences in a given sub-corpus. According to table 3, the primary purpose of hedges is to display a provisional assessment of the veracity of the propositional content. The English authors take ownership of the content and avoid broad generalization by employing cognition-based verbs like "in my opinion," "believe," "understand," and "think," as demonstrated in instances 1 and 2.
1. Although it is always elusive to ascertain the appropriate amount of words for a study of this nature, we believe that the sample examined is large enough to achieve the objectives that we have set for ourselves in this study.
2. In my opinion, hedging is the result of uniting in a single concept aspect that arises from the discursive macrostructure and searching for a term that in syntax addresses all this diversity.

El-Seidi in his article entitled "Metadiscourse in English and Arabic
Argumentative Writing: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Texts Written by American and Egyptian University Students", he described the categories and frequency of metadiscourse in original and non-original Arabic texts. He discovered that the NA (Native Arabic) group had a greater overall frequency of metadiscourse action classes than the NNA (Non-Native Arabic) group. Additionally, despite the fact that empathy courses occurred far more frequently in the first group than in the latter, variations in hedges frequencies and attitude indicators did not differ significantly between the two groups. The classifications, purposes, and contexts of these devices are displayed in the next subsections. 17 El-Seidi further stated that the findings of his study revealed the following crucial findings: first, the NA essay had the most metadiscourse phrases, whereas the NNE set had the fewest. Metadiscourse is used more frequently in the NNA text than the NE one.
The most significant difference regarding individual grades was related to empathy, which was the highest score in the NA group. Regarding hedging, the NE essay contains more hedging arguments than any other group. The frequency of attitude markers were almost equally low in all four groups, but lowest in the NNE group. 18 Probably, maybe, possibly, perhaps, those are examples of modal adverbs that indicate the author is aware of the hesitancy of their interpretations. 1) It could be more advantageous to utilize the operator idea for things that are explicitly syntactic and then narrow its scope of use. Finally, authors frequently utilize adverbs of frequency like typically, generally, in a certain way, occasionally, etc. to emphasize constraints on the application of their ideas. 2) Typically, numerous correctors are used in this rating technique to make up for the unreliability of only one, and the ratings are frequently based on a percentile rank. The linguistic devices used to code hedges in the Arabic RAs can be categorized into the same classes identified in the English sub-corpus. In this case, we can use devices like verbs of cognition with a first-person plural subject, e.g., na'tabiru (we consider) and nulahizu (we observe), authors declared the responsibility for the content, while limiting its universality:

‫مرح‬ ‫على‬ ‫نظمت‬ ‫ناجي‬ ‫قصيدة‬ ‫أن‬ ‫نعتبر‬ ‫أن‬ ‫يمكننا‬ ‫لذلك‬ ‫لتين‬
Therefore, we can consider that the poem Naji had been organized in two phases Tentativeness in the Arabic RAs was expressed by means of particles like rubbama (probably), qad (possibly, which has the meaning only with the present tense of the verbs).
The following examples show the tentative tone of the statements: ‫الخطاب‬ ‫ى‬ ‫مستو‬ ‫على‬ ‫ن‬ ‫تكو‬ ‫أو‬ ‫الجملة،‬ ‫ى‬ ‫مستو‬ ‫على‬ ‫ن‬ ‫املكو‬ ‫هذا‬ ‫حدود‬ ‫ن‬ ‫تكو‬ ‫قد‬ ‫الواقع،‬ ‫في‬ Indeed, the limits of this component might be at the sentence level, or might be at the level of discourse Arabic writers frequently utilize frequency adverbs to emphasize constraints on the application of their arguments, such as 'a> datan (usually), ahya> nan (sometimes), and others, as can be seen in the following example:

‫امل‬ ‫خالل‬ ‫من‬ ‫متاحا‬ ‫الجانب‬ ‫هذا‬ ‫ن‬ ‫مايكو‬ ‫عادة‬ ‫للفرد‬ ‫املعروفة‬ ‫الحقيقية‬ ‫والحقائق‬ ‫علومات‬ ‫للموضوع‬ ‫السابقة‬ ‫التجربة‬ ‫خالل‬ ‫من‬ ‫وأحيانا‬ ‫الاتجاه،‬ ‫موضوع‬ ‫ل‬ ‫حو‬
This aspect is usually available through the information and real facts known to the individual on the direction subject, and sometimes through the previous experience of the subject These findings have important ramifications. As seen, hedges are extensively utilized by both English and Arabic writers to attenuate their claims. The data, however, show that hedges are utilized more frequently in English publications than in Arabic articles. More study on the usage of metadiscursive markers is needed to gain a more thorough knowledge of the effects of using these metadiscursive markers.
El-Seidi said that an interesting finding regarding the L1-L2 comparison of Arabic is the higher frequency of empathy in the former group, which is again ascribed to the frequent use of 'inna. This tool also seems to be preferred by Arabic L1 writers, while Arabic L2 is favored by other tools, which are more or less on par with English tools, e.g., bi-wuduhin (obvious) and bi-'al-tab'i (of course). A holistic assessment of the NNA essays revealed that 'inna was mostly used by the most proficient writers in this group.
This observation certainly needs to be consolidated with further research focusing on the correlation between L2 proficiency level and the use of metadiscourse.
El-Seidi added that, these findings have numerous important consequences. First, in their L1 and L2 essays, native English speakers utilize more hedges than empathy sentences. It appears that their focus on defusing their argument has been redirected to their L2 writing. Second, it may be presumed that native Arabic speakers' proclivity to employ empathy in their L1 writing carries over into their L2 writings. Other data, however, would invalidate the transfer idea. That is, native English speakers place more importance in Arabic L2 writings than in English L1 essays. It is proposed here that L2 authors attempt to conform to the standards of the target language, which may differ from the original language. 19 According to Connor, Swales's research has demonstrated that one needs to discriminate between various speech and writing genres in a particular language as well as to changes between spoken and written discourse. The spoken Arabic genre has been likened to the written English genre in earlier work on contrastive rhetoric in English and Arabic. Furthermore, the comparison only touches the intrasentential and intersentential levels; it does not address the text's overall discourse level. Even in the Middle Ages, explanatory prose rhetoric in written Arabic speech was heavily inspired by Aristotelian rhetoric and shared many similarities with expository prose rhetoric in English today. 20 Finally, studying hedges in academic writing is essential. Several recommendations for teaching L2 writing are made in this study. Metadiscourse research might be advantageous in an L2 writing course. Students must be familiar with the principles and understand the context of each metadiscourse lesson. They must master the different phrases for each class that are accessible in the target language. Students must be trained in the intended use of metadiscourse as a rhetorical device. Guided reading of genuine texts demonstrating excellent metadiscourse may be beneficial in this regard.

Conclusion
This study showed considerable differences in hedge usage across cultures, languages, and genres. It has been shown that both English and Arabic authors use metadiscourse markers, particularly hedges, in their L1 writing to be cautious with their generalizations. According to a study of two native sets, the use of hedges in English RAs is higher than in Arabic Ras. More study is needed to determine link between reader-writer accountability. In practice, native English speakers are more likely to utilize Hedges than native Arabic speakers. This shows that in learning Arabic in English classes, it is necessary to emphasize the sense of language and the prevailing language culture of a language. Understanding and producing texts is not enough just to understand the structure of the language, but also the differences between the texts and the culture of each language. The results have the potential to have a substantial influence on the field of teaching and learning Arabic as a second language in an English 20 Cynthia May Sheikholeslami and Nabila el-Taher Makhlouf, "The Impact of Arabic on ESL Expository Writing." in Diversity in Language: Contrastive Studies in Arabic and English Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000. environment. When discrepancies between texts and cultures are discovered, they may be explained to pupils.