Hedges in Farsi and English Legal Research Articles

All human beings seek absolute security and certainty in all aspects of their lives or even in the whole universe by applying law. On the other hand, hedging as a signal of uncertainty and evasiveness is widely usedin legal genre that is against the natural desire of people. Among different legal genres, this paper aims to investigate the frequency of employing hedging in Farsi and English legal research articles as themost accepted genre among academia to provide real data and to discuss why this strategy (hedging) is widely applied by legal community members. Results analysis showed that there is significantdifferences between two legal communities (Farsi and English) in the frequency of employing hedges in favor of English. Finally, researchers conclude with some teaching implications for Farsi legal researcharticle writers to write in a way that be more accepted in the international legal community. Although there are different functions for hedging in different situations and areas of studying, this studysuggests that hedging can be justified by Relativism and Uncertainty Principle. Moreover, since legal texts have a special and complex vocabulary, structure, and discourse, hedging as a strategy which causesdifferent interpretations, adds to its inexplicitness and complexity which are regarded as a natural characteristic of legal genre that help it remain unique and special.

کلیدواژه ها:

contrastive study ، legal research articles ، hedges