Hedges, Boosters and Lexical Invisibility: Noticing Modifiers in Academic Texts

Abstract

The ways that writers distinguish their opinions from facts and evaluate the certainty of their assertions is central to the meaning of academic texts, yet this is an area that second language students often find extremely problematic. In this paper I examine the view that the items writers use to modify their claims, commonly referred to as hedges and boosters, may actually be unnoticed by L2 readers, a phenomenon Low (1996) calls the 'Lexical Invisibility Hypothesis'. Data is presented from a small retrospective think-aloud study which explores how 14 Cantonese L1 undergraduates respond to hedges and boosters in an academic text. The discussion is supported by questionnaire data which seeks to determine learners' awareness of the meanings of these forms. The results suggest that while the subjects generally attended to the boosters, hedges did seem to be more invisible.