Corpus-based Analysis of Hedging in Nigerian English Academic Discourse Across Disciplines

Hedging, the linguistic expression of epistemic uncertainty and propositional commitment limitation, is a foundational feature of academic discourse that reflects discipline-specific epistemological norms and community conventions about knowledge claim authorization. This study presents a corpus-based analysis of hedging patterns in Nigerian English academic discourse across four disciplinary areas, using a purpose-built corpus of published Nigerian academic journal articles. A corpus of four hundred articles, one hundred each from Nigerian journals in Applied Linguistics, Economics, Chemistry, and Medicine, was assembled and processed using AntConc corpus analysis software. A hedging inventory combining modal auxiliary, lexical verb, adverb, adjective, and prepositional phrase hedge categories was applied to generate frequency profiles for each disciplinary sub-corpus. Findings reveal significant inter-disciplinary variation in hedging frequency and strategy type distribution, with medical articles showing the highest hedge density and chemistry articles the lowest, consistent with the differential epistemic norms of natural science and clinical research discourse internationally. Within each disciplinary sub-corpus, comparison with international English-medium journal articles in the same field reveals that Nigerian English academic writers show lower hedging frequency overall, with particular under-use of epistemic modal verb hedges and lexical verb hedges such as appear and suggest. The study argues that this hedging under-use reflects both pedagogical under-emphasis in Nigerian academic writing instruction and the influence of Nigerian English rhetorical norms that prioritize assertive proposition framing. Implications for academic writing pedagogy at Nigerian universities are developed. Keywords: hedging, academic discourse, corpus analysis, Nigerian English, disciplinary writing.