摘要：Academic writers resort to hedging as one of the interpersonal metadiscourse category not only to present their findings cautiously but also to minimize the effects of Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). The purpose of the present study was to compare and contrast the frequency and types of hedges in Discussion sections of Environmental Sciences Research Articles (RAs) written by English Research Writers (ERWs), Iranian Research Writers (IRWs) who write in English, and Iranian Research Writers (IRWs) who write in Farsi. To this end, 60 RAs in the targeted field were selected from leading journals (20 for each group), and then the used hedges were analyzed based on Salager-Meyer (1994) taxonomy. With regard to the use of hedges in English, this study did not find any significant differences between English and Iranian authors’ writings. However, the findings revealed significant differences between English and Farsi written articles. This discrepancy can be attributed to the nature of Farsi language which might consider less hedged texts as highly validated ones. However, this is opposed to the credibility of using hedges in this field in the international academic discourse community.
