Interactive metadiscourse markers in introduction of research articles: A comparative study of disciplinary influences

Metadiscourse is a new and interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement. Recent trends in the study of written texts reflect a growing interest in interaction between readers and writers. Several studies have studied metadiscourse from the descriptive and contrastive perspectives; there is a lack of experimental work on this topic. This study reports a comparative study of interactive metadiscourse markers in quantitative and qualitative research articles across the disciplines of applied linguistics, medicine, chemistry and psychology to shed some light on the ways academic writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre to persuade readers in their own discourse community. . Drawing on Hyland's metadiscourse framework, the study examined the use of five types of interactive metadiscourse, together with their subtypes, in a corpus of 100 research articles. No statistically significant difference was achieved by functional-contextual analysis in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers across disciplines. The analysis suggested how academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. The findings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and for novice writers who would like to publish their research in academic journals.

کلیدواژه ها:

Academic writing ، Genre analysis ، Interactive metadiscourse markers ، Metadiscourse ، Research articles