Between detachment and commitment: hedging and boosting from scientific articles to university press releases

In the press releases issued by universities to showcase the research of their affiliated authors, the purpose of knowledge dissemination coexists with that of self-promotion (e.g. Di Ferrante et al., 2021; Petrocelli et al., 2022). This reflects the hybrid nature of corporate PR (e.g. Jacobs, 1999; Catenaccio, 2008). Considering that academic discourse often enhances reliability through hedging strategies (e.g., Hyland, 1998a), whereas science news tends to emphasise the impact of findings (e.g., Stocking, 1999), this study examines how hedges and boosters of academic discourse manifest in press releases. Using concordance analysis, descriptive and inferential statistics, and discourse analysis, 30 academic articles and their associated press releases were analysed. The results indicate that boosting strategies are primarily used in press releases. However, these also contain hedges to convey credibility by acknowledging scientific uncertainties. Further studies with a larger corpus and additional metadiscursive elements are proposed to validate these results.