The total number of hedges in the corpus of 40 000 words
amounted to 574 items. The overall frequency of hedges
per 100 words was 1.45. Interestingly, the same figure
appeared in Hyland’s plenary presentation in the BAAHE
Conference (Hyland 2006). He had researched articles of
competent speakers in 8 disciplines, both in soft and hard
sciences. In his corpus, the frequency of hedges amounted
to 14.5 per 1000 words. Soft sciences, due to their
interpretative nature, manifested a higher frequency of
hedges, for example, 18.5 hedges per 1000 words in
philosophy or 18.02 in applied linguistics. However,
Hyland (2006) did not discriminate between native and
non-native writers of English, nor did he limit his research
to a particular section of a research paper.