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An exploration of metadiscourse usage in book review articles across three academic disciplines: a contrastive analysis of corpus-based research approach
Abstract
Metadiscourse refers to the linguistic element that is used to communicate meanings with imagined readers and to express a viewpoint as members of a particular academic community. Accordingly, this study reported the distributions of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers in a corpus of 99 research articles representing the English language, Computer Sciences, and Education disciplines. To observe the writers’ metadiscourse devices usage in their discourse community, Hyland’s (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. Continuum, New York, 2005) metadiscourse taxonomy was employed. The data were computed through descriptive statistics, Chi square, Kruskal–Wallis test, and content analysis. Hence, the data revealed that though articles in all disciplines employed both interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers, English Language discipline articles contained highest metadiscourse devices compared with Education and Computer sciences discipline articles. It was also observed that the book review writers used much more interactive markers such as transition and evidential devices than interactional markers. However, among interactional markers, self-mention markers were extensively used. The data also indicated that there was statistically a significant difference across disciplines in using interactive and interactional metadiscourse devices. Hence, these findings implied that academic writing teachers should focus on discipline-oriented metadiscourse devices while teaching academic writing skills.
... The most well-documented are disciplinary differences unique to particular academic 'tribes' (Becher and Trowler, 2001) (for example, soft versus hard sciences as well as subsidiary disciplines) and academic genres (e.g., research articles, postgraduate theses, and argumentative essays), emphasising that effective academic writing requires writers to conform to complex and varied community-specific rhetorical expectations (Hyland, 2004a). Recent studies that reveal finer differences in use across the research article (RA) genre with regard to the section of the report (e.g., Crosthwaite et al., 2017), research paradigm (e.g., Cao and Hu, 2014), methodology (e.g., Liu and Tseng, 2021), publication venue (e.g., Birhan, 2021), and its impact factor and prestige (e.g., El-Dakhs, 2018a), further attest to the challenges involved in disciplinary socialisation. Increasingly, corpus studies have adopted longitudinal designs (e.g., Gillaerts, 2014;Jiang, 2018a, 2018b;Liu and Huang, 2017), exploring how uses of metadiscourse resources evolve diachronically, perhaps from a cross-disciplinary perspective (see the works of Jiang, 2018a, 2018b). ...
... Consistent with what has been reported by Hyland (2017), most authors adhered to the broad metadiscourse research tradition, visible in the high uptake of Hyland's interpersonal model (2005a) and stance and engagement framework (2005b). From a theoretical perspective, adherence to the Hylandian perspective was evident in author alignment with Hyland and Tse's (2004:161) oft-cited claim that 'all metadiscourse is interpersonal' (e.g., Birhan, 2021;Cao and Hu, 2014;Kojima et al., 2019) or belief in the importance of interactional resources in academic communication as a socio-rhetorical activity (e.g., Gong et al., 2021;Hu and Cao, 2015). Authors also referenced more practical concerns, including the interpersonal model's ubiquity (e.g., El-Dakhs, 2018b; Hu and Cao, 2015) an aid to study comparability (Akbas, 2014;Birhan, 2021), its impact as measured through citations (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2016), reliability as a measure of metadiscourse (e.g., Gu and Xu, 2021), and comprehensiveness (e.g., Akbas, 2014). ...
... From a theoretical perspective, adherence to the Hylandian perspective was evident in author alignment with Hyland and Tse's (2004:161) oft-cited claim that 'all metadiscourse is interpersonal' (e.g., Birhan, 2021;Cao and Hu, 2014;Kojima et al., 2019) or belief in the importance of interactional resources in academic communication as a socio-rhetorical activity (e.g., Gong et al., 2021;Hu and Cao, 2015). Authors also referenced more practical concerns, including the interpersonal model's ubiquity (e.g., El-Dakhs, 2018b; Hu and Cao, 2015) an aid to study comparability (Akbas, 2014;Birhan, 2021), its impact as measured through citations (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2016), reliability as a measure of metadiscourse (e.g., Gu and Xu, 2021), and comprehensiveness (e.g., Akbas, 2014). We also speculate that, as marker-based models, such approaches are easier to apply and reach a consensus on in comparison to metadiscourse at the move level (Ädel, 2023). ...
A means to control how writers mark their presence, negotiate knowledge claims, and engage with their audience, metadiscourse is one of the most prominent approaches to analysing academic writing. The present systematic review attempts to take stock of the existing literature by investigating how metadiscourse has been researched in academic writing by analysing a sample of 370 high-quality empirical studies published between 1990 and 2021. Studies were coded for their conceptual frameworks, research designs, data sources, study contexts, writers, texts, corpora, and reporting practices. It was found that over 80% of research involved cross-sectional descriptive corpus-based analysis, drawing on intercultural rhetoric. Owing to its impact, ease of application, and study comparability, most research adhered to the ‘broad’ tradition in metadiscourse. Representative of this approach, Hyland’s interpersonal framework and models of stance and engagement were prevalent, although difficulties in undertaking a ‘thick’ analysis of such a wide variety of features coupled with publishing constraints meant that many authors narrowed their focus to a few select features (especially hedges, boosters, and self-mentions). Approximately 37% of corpus-based research followed the ‘thin’ tradition, with an emphasis on marker frequency counts over contextually-bound interpretations. Corpora of English texts, notably, research articles, were prominently studied, with little research taking place outside of university contexts or recruiting human participants as informants. We discuss avenues to advance research in metadiscourse, through identifying possible future inquiries and improving study quality.
... The findings indicated that irrespective of the context, the instructors followed a similar pattern in the use of MDMs and employed transitions more than other interactive MDMs. In the written context, numerous studies have investigated interactive (Martín-Laguna & Alcón, 2015), interactional (Yoon, 2021), or both types of metadiscourse (Birhan, 2021;El-Dakhs, 2020;Herriman, 2022;Hyland & Jiang, 2022;Liao, 2020;Qin & Uccelli, 2019). ...
... In a similar way, they found that the instructors used the former more often than the latter in their speeches. Conversely, in many studies in the written setting (Birhan, 2021;Herriman, 2022;Hyland & Jiang, 2022), interactive MDMs were mostly more frequent than interactional ones. It implies that the mode of discourse plays a significant role in the adoption of metadiscourse devices, as the spoken mode requires more interactional MDMs than interactive ones, while it is the other way around for the written mode. ...
The current study explored and compared the employment of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers (MDMs) by the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) speaking test takers at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. To conduct this discourse analysis research, a mixed-methods approach with concurrent transformative design was employed. In the quantitative phase, the frequency of MDMs was calculated and compared, while in the qualitative phase, the variety of MDMs was analyzed. The data comprised a total of 36 YouTube videos on the test takers’ performance in part 3 of the IELTS speaking test at different band scores. The IELTS speaking band scores were converted into Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) levels using a converting scale, and the videos were transcribed to be analyzed. The results showed a level-by-level increasing trend in MDM use from beginner to advanced level. Moreover, the highly proficient L2 speakers used a wider range and a larger variety of MDMs in their discussions. The comparison between interactional and interactive MDMs also revealed that L2 speakers, at all proficiency levels, use the former considerably more than the latter. The findings of this study have significant pedagogical implications for language assessment, teaching, and learning, which are discussed in the discussion section in detail.
... As in the case of Aristotle's persuasive appeals, metadiscourse markers have been examined across a wide range of genres, including research articles (e.g., El-Dakhs, 2018a, b; Kashiha, 2021), master's and doctoral theses (e.g., Kawase, 2015;Míguez-Álvarez et al., 2023), academic blogs (e.g., , and book reviews (e.g., Birhan, 2021;Soleimani et al., 2020). However, studies examining metadiscourse markers in argumentative essays are far less common. ...
This study investigated the use of persuasive strategies in argumentative academic writing by Arabic–English bilingual English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in their second language (English, L2), compared to their first language (Arabic, L1) and English L1 writing by native speakers of English. This tripartite comparison between bilinguals’ L1 and L2 writing and English native speakers’ writing is a key contribution of the study since it allows us to consider how persuasion is employed in the participants’ L2 in light of two baselines of comparisons. To this end, 60 Saudi undergraduates wrote argumentative paragraphs in English and Arabic, and these paragraphs were compared against one another and also against English argumentative paragraphs by American undergraduates for the use of persuasive strategies. The findings revealed statistically significant differences in the use of persuasive strategies across the three groups of paragraphs. While the EFL learners tended to employ logos and pathos strategies more frequently in their L1 and L2 writing than English Native Speakers (NS), the NS, in turn, produced significantly more ethos strategies than the EFL learners. The differences were most noted in the use of logos strategies involving logical reasoning, pathos strategies – such as evaluative expressions and fostering collegiality – and ethos strategies, including demonstrating involvement, sharing personal perspectives, and modulating commitment to claims and community use. In addition, the results showed that increased English language proficiency had a limited effect on the use of persuasive strategies by EFL learners in their English writing.
... Salas (2013) examined disciplines like medicine, economics, and linguistics, emphasizing the impact of disciplinary conventions on metadiscourse. Recent studies by Birhan (2021) and Boginskaya (2023) further explore these differences, including nuanced variations in lexical hedging. ...
The concept of metadiscourses has developed greatly since it was proposed by Zelig Harris in 1959. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the definitions of metadiscourse and evolution of metadiscourse studies. In addition, the research patterns of metadiscourse research in major academic databases are analyzed. We find that metadiscourse research is keeping an upward tendency since the occurrence of this term and has boomed in recent years, especially in academic writing, whether from synchronic or diachronic perspective. Synchronic studies examine metadiscourse in a variety of written and oral contexts, revealing interdisciplinary and cross-cultural differences; while diachronic studies trace the historical development of metasdiscourse practices. The paper demonstrates the growing research interest in metadiscourse and offers future prospects for scholars.
... Although numerous scholars have explored the phenomenon of IM across different registers (Al-Subhi, 2022;Birhan, 2021;Chen & Li, 2023;Herriman, 2022;Lee, 2021), disciplines (Hyland, 2010;Rashidi & Alihosseini, 2012), learners (Yoon, 2021), and languages (Yu & Wen, 2022), it is only recently that its significance and representation in translated texts have attracted scholarly attention (Chou et al., 2023). IM has been widely researched in second-language writing and academic discourse (Hyland, 2010;Kim & Lim, 2013). ...
This study examines the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of English medical research article abstracts (RAAs), a crucial medium for the global dissemination of medical information. Two corpora were compiled for analysis: the first consisting of non-translated English medical RAAs sourced from ten leading English-language medical journals, and the second of English medical RAAs translated from ten prominent Chinese medical journals. The findings of the study reveal several key points: 1) Translated medical RAAs exhibit lower levels of tentativeness, primarily due to a significant underrepresentation of hedges (e.g. likely); 2) Translated medical RAAs display higher levels of assertiveness, as indicated by the more frequent use of boosters (e.g. significantly); and 3) No significant difference was observed between the two types of medical RAAs in terms of their use of attitude markers, indicating a similarity in the attitudinal approach when presenting medical research findings in both translated and non-translated medical RAAs. These divergences can be attributed to the unique rhetorical and disciplinary conventions that govern the dissemination of medical knowledge in China compared to Western countries, highlighting the influence of cultural and linguistic norms on scientific communication. This investigation offers novel insights into the translation of medical RAAs, shedding light on cross-cultural divergences in the presentation of medical findings and enriching the discourse on scientific communication across languages.
... For instance, in Hyland and Jiang's (2022) intra-journal study of JEAP, the highest density of metadiscourse markers was found in textually oriented papers and the least in pedagogical papers. Birhan's (2021) investigation of metadiscourse in book review articles across the disciplines of English Language, Computer Sciences, and Education observed significant variations, with the highest number of metadiscourse devices in the first discipline, in contrast to the other two. In academic discourse studies, the focus on metadiscourse variation across disciplines remains an important issue. ...
The widespread use of metadiscourse is vital to the study of academic discourse and genre analysis. This article focuses on the concept of metadiscursive verb patterns (MVPs) and examines their variation in English research articles across four domains representing hard/soft‐pure and hard/soft‐applied disciplines. Based on a bottom‐up investigation of a self‐compiled corpus, three findings are highlighted: (1) the crucial rhetorical roles of MVPs were established by their distinct functions in knowledge construction; (2) significant interdisciplinary variations of MVPs reflected the typical written conventions shared by writers of different disciplinary communities; and (3) the association between (sub‐)categories of MVPs and disciplines foregrounded the most popular rhetorical strategies for using MVPs and salient disciplinary features. These findings are discussed in terms of the factors governing the use of MVPs and identification of disciplinary boundaries. Pedagogical considerations for understanding MVPs and proper rhetorical strategies for using these tools are discussed.
... On the one hand, it shares intellectual accountability with the genre of review, both of which contribute fairly minimally to the construction of disciplinary knowledge (Zou & Hyland, 2020, p. 99). On the other, the genre of 3R differentiates itself from the review genre by offering little to nothing to the evaluation of fellow researchers' works (Birhan, 2021;Hunston, 2005). The similarities and discrepancies between the genres of 3R and review suggest the functional variety of communicative purposes in academic conflict and confrontation, calling for studies to untangle the variations and tactics of evaluation and argumentation in the genre of 3R. ...
... These studies exposed the issues of metadiscourse makers in newspaper were complex. Other minor research in metadiscourse makers was explored in the high school settings (Soysal, 2020) and school textbook (Birhan, 2021) Based on the findings of the previous studies of metadiscourse markers on academic writing, it can be concluded that metadiscourse research on EFL students' academic writing, particularly by comparing the abilities of students from different grades in using metadiscourse markers, has received little attention from previous researchers. As a result, this study will attempt to compare the use of metadiscourse markers in academic writing by university students at various grade levels. ...
The research on metadiscourse markers investigation in academic texts has grown very rapidly in the last decade. However, research on interactive metadiscourse markers on EFL students' academic writing is still relatively underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to reveal how the competence of EFL students in the use of interactive metadiscourse in academic writing by comparing two groups of students with different grades, third-semester students and fifth-semester students. The research design is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. A total of 40 students were participating in this research and divided into two groups. Each group consists of 20 students. They were assigned to write a minimum-250-word essay about the importance of English mastery in the disrupted era of 4.0. Around 818 interactive markers were identified in the student’s essay texts. The results reveal that the use of interactive discourse markers in the students' writing was considered still low in quantity. The transition markers were the most dominant found in the text, followed by frame markers, code gloss, endophoric markers, and evidential respectively. Moreover, the students in the fifth semester perform slightly better than their third-semester counterparts at using the interactive metadiscourse markers. However, most of the students in both groups still encountered difficulties to employ the interactive markers in their writing. The lack of practice and the student's native language practice might have contributed to the low quality of the student's writing.
... The distinctive feature of news commentary decides that research on interactional metadiscourse in it would provide valuable insights into how writers take up positions and align themselves with readers in a particular context. Considerable research has been conducted to investigate the presence of metadiscourse in various registers, such as instruction manuals (Herriman, 2022), book reviews (Birhan, 2021), business letters (Lee, 2021), social media advertisements (AI-Subhi, 2022) and so on. These studies contribute to revealing how metadiscourse functions as rhetorical devices in a particular register. ...
Drawing on Hyland's model of interactional metadiscourse (2005; 2005a), this paper investigates the distribution of interactional metadiscourse in news commentaries of China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT), two leading newspapers in China and the United States. The corpus retrieved includes 60 news commentaries on the topic of COVID-19 covering six months from January to June, 2022 when the resurgence of COVID-19 in China has aroused public debates and attracted worldwide media attention. This study reveals that both stance and engagement, are frequently employed in CD and NYT. Nevertheless, the occurrences of interactional features in NYT are far more frequent than those in CD, which reflects a higher level of explicit interaction of the former. Results of chi-square test of the sub-categorical interactional metadiscourse mark significant differences in the distribution of hedges, self-mention and engagement markers between the two corpora. NYT employs greater number of all the three subcategories, indicating NYT writers' attempts to both express a clear personal stance to their views and to closely align with readers, whereas CD shows a strong tendency of conveying their evaluations and commitment towards propositions by employing stance nearly three times as many as engagement.
... Where the non-parametric independent samples Kruskal-Wallis test observe a significant variation across groups, post hoc multiple comparison testing using Bonferroni Correction is applied for pairwise comparisons between individual timeframes. Other linguistic studies of corpora, e.g., Birhan (2021), use similar applications of statistical analysis. ...
Science advice for governments attracted great scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the public spotlight on institutions and individual experts—putting science advice on the ‘Grand Stage’. A review of the academic literature identified transparency, a plurality of expertise, the science and policy ‘boundary’, and consensus whilst addressing uncertainty as key themes. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has been the primary provider of coordinated scientific and technical advice to the UK Government during emergencies since 2009. Using the first 89 of SAGE’s meeting minutes (study period: 22 January 2020–13 May 2021), the ‘metadata’ and linguistic choices are analysed to identify how SAGE’s role and protocols are communicated. This includes understanding which experts were regularly taking part in discussions, the role of scientific experts in the science advisory system and their influence on policy choices, and the degree of consensus and uncertainty within this group of experts—all of which relate to the degree of transparency with the public. In addition, a temporal analysis examines how these practices, such as linguistically marking uncertainty, developed over the period studied. Linguistic markers indexing certainty and uncertainty increased, demonstrating a commitment to precise and accurate communication of the science, including ambiguities and the unknown. However, self-references to SAGE decreased over the period studied. The study highlights how linguistic analysis can be a useful approach for developing an understanding of science communication practices and scientific ambiguity. By considering how SAGE presents to those outside the process, the research calls attention to what remains ‘behind the scenes’ and consequently limits the public’s understanding of SAGE’s role in the COVID-19 response.
... For data of different magnitudes, different d c values need to be chosen. However, using the t value to determine the d c value as a percentage reduces the dependence of the parameter on a particular problem [37], and although the choice of the t value depends on the experience of the algorithm user, in general, the algorithm has only one parameter, which is more convenient to use. ...
English is a universal language and is widely used. In order to deepen the cognition of language, this paper proposes to analyse the variation of metadiscourse verb patterns in English academic papers from within and between disciplines. By comparing the metadiscourse chunks used in various disciplines, it is concluded that there are obvious differences in the verb types of the subject papers. Analysing various identification algorithms of verb types, it is obtained that the combination of the word movement distance (WMD) model and the R&L density peak clustering algorithm is the best. Using the R&L density peak clustering, identification parameters are easy to determine, and when combined with the WMD model to calculate the similarity of words, it improve the accuracy of verb pattern clustering. By comparison, it is proved that the accuracy of the algorithm combining the WMD model and R&L density peak clustering reaches 30.06%, and the effect of identifying verb pattern variation is the best.
... Metadiscourse has already been researched in a wide range of genres, either academic or non-academic. Only focusing on the former, we have seen that many crosslinguacultural and cross-disciplinary metadiscourse studies chose one particular genre as a point of departure, such as research articles (Hyland, 1998a(Hyland, , 1999bPeacock, 2006;Mur-Dueñas, 2011;Khedri, Chan, & Ebrahimi, 2013;Carrió-Pastor, 2020), textbooks (Hyland, 1999a(Hyland, , 2004a, student's argumentative essays (Ädel, 2006;Hong & Cao, 2014;Çandarlı et al., 2015; J. J. Lee & Deakin, 2016;Ho & Li, 2018;Yoon & Römer, 2020), academic book reviews (Tse & Hyland, 2006Birhan, 2021). In this subsection, I only review cross-genre studies where the use of metadiscourse was compared between at least two different genres. ...
Metadiscourse, which is defined as the ways in which writers/speakers use reflexive language to interact with readers/hearers, has gained increasing scholarly interest over the past few decades. In written academic discourse, metadiscourse elements are considered crucial as i) their use helps writers organize information flow to guide readers through the text (interactive dimension: e.g., además, primero, como se ha mencionado, por tanto, es decir); ii) they allow writers to express their stance on propositional information and engage readers in the co-construction of the text (interactional dimension: e.g., puede que, en nuestra opinión, efectivamente, curiosamente, veamos).
Despite the widespread popularity of this research topic, most previous metadiscourse studies have centered around English, whereas other languages such as Spanish and especially Spanish as a foreign language have been rather under-researched. Moreover, although metadiscourse use is considered a multifactorial phenomenon, most of the prior research has focused on investigating either a single factor or multiple factors but without exploring the potential interaction between the factors.
To plug the gap, the present study sets out to examine the role of nativeness and expertise in the patterns of metadiscourse use in Spanish academic writing. To this end, four written academic corpora (110 texts, totaling 1.2 million word tokens) were compiled to represent different nativeness (Spanish non-native and Spanish native) and expertise (novice and expert) of the writers. Drawing on the interpersonal model by Hyland (2005a) and other valuable research, I adopted a fine-grained taxonomy as the analytical framework for metadiscourse analysis and created a list of Spanish markers for metadiscourse search. The computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software package, MAXQDA 2020 (VERBI Software, 2019), was used to manage the corpora and code metadiscourse elements. The obtained data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The statistical test results showed that there were significant differences between non-native/native and novice/expert writer groups in the employment of certain metadiscoursal resources. Moreover, the key metadiscourse item analysis also indicated that some markers were highly characteristic of certain writer groups, probably due to several reasons including register awareness, genre differences, lexical competence, and culture-bound factors. Lastly, the qualitative textual analysis revealed each metadiscoursal resource’s specific discoursal/rhetorical functions in Spanish texts, where most of them were shared among the writer groups while some of them were performed differently across writer groups.
Implications of the study were drawn from both teachers’ and learners’ perspectives. The conclusion also points out some limitations and potential research avenues of the study.
... Based on this, the further work was done by Vande Kopple (1985), Mauranen (1993), Ädel (2006), Hyland(2018) The study of academic texts is a popular strand in the metadiscourse research. Investigations have been conducted on the use of metadiscourse markers in scientific writing across various disciplines (Hyland & Jiang, 2018), in PhD candidature confirmation reports (Jiang & Ma, 2018) and in book review articles (Birhan, 2021). Another common strand in metadiscourse research is investigation into the use of metadiscourse among different cultural groups. ...
The paper explores the use of metadiscourse markers by L1 speakers of English and proficient L2 speakers in opinion articles. The data for the analysis consists of 90 articles from the most popular newspapers in the USA, the UK and Ukraine, each variety represented with 30 articles. The classification of metadiscourse is primarily based on Hyland’s taxonomy with a more detailed approach to identifying metadiscoursive occurrences. In addition to investigating the most common patterns of engagement across three varieties of English, the study looks into how those patterns influence L1 and L2 readers, in particularly how engaged they are in the reading process and they would rate the persuasiveness of the text. Findings suggest that despite all three varieties having approximately the same number of metadiscourse markers, there’s a difference as to what types are prevalent in the variety. There are also differences observed concerning the reader engagement among L1 and L2 readers.
Previous studies found an increasing trend of linguistic positivity in academic texts. That is, there is a tendency towards using more positive language than negative language in academic writing. However, most of these studies included research articles as the corpus data. Little is known about whether such a trend exists in book reviews, an important academic genre that features evaluative language. Thus, this paper presents a pilot study on the features and temporal dynamics of the positive/negative language of book reviews in the discipline of linguistics. Based on a corpus of 1550 book reviews published between 1990 and 2020, it was found that book reviews have experienced a significant upward trend in terms of both positive words and sentiment scores. Possible reasons and implications of the findings are discussed.
Despite the significant progress in studies on metadiscourse, scarce attention has been paid to it in the digital context. Social media platforms including Twitter have become arenas for the current Sino-U.S. discourse competition. In this regard, Twitter can be used to observe the diverse usage of metadiscourse by different political figures and uncover the underlying mechanisms. Combining computer-aided metadiscourse extraction and critical discourse analysis, the paper explores metadiscourse markers from the Chinese and American spokespersons’ tweets to reveal their rhetoric and social functions based on Foucault's “power discourse theory.” The results show that the American spokespersons are more inclined to use emotional persuasion and define some specific objects, which is part of the division & rejection system. In contrast, utterances of the Chinese spokespersons constitute a semantic terrain to distinguish truth from falsehood, utilizing the opposition system to eliminate their inferior discourse power status.
Taxonomy alignment is essential for integrating knowledge across diverse domains and languages, facilitating information retrieval and data integration. Traditional methods heavily reliant on domain experts are time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an automated taxonomy alignment approach leveraging large language models (LLMs). We introduce a method that embeds taxonomy nodes into a continuous low-dimensional vector space, utilizing hierarchical relationships within category concepts to enhance alignment accuracy. Our approach capitalizes on the contextual understanding and semantic information capabilities of LLMs, offering a promising solution to the challenges of taxonomy alignment. We conducted experiments on two pairs of real-world taxonomies and demonstrated that our method is comparable in accuracy to manual alignment, while significantly reducing time, operational, and maintenance costs associated with taxonomy alignment. Our case study showcases the effectiveness of our approach by visualizing the taxonomy alignment results. This automated alignment framework addresses the increasing demand for accurate and efficient alignment processes across diverse knowledge domains.
Using categorization of interactive metadiscourse, the present study attempted to contrastively compare editorials of two writing cultures, Filipinos and Americans. The objectives of the study were identifying the cultural features revealed by the Filipino editorialists and Anglo-American editorialists, and determining how the two writing cultures differ in the utilization of interactional metadiscourse resources in their editorials. A total of 180 editorials served as the corpus of the study; 90 from the Philippine Daily Inquirers (PDY) and 90 from the New York Times (NYT). The findings revealed that American editorialists significantly employed metadiscource resources as compared to Filipino editorialists specifically the employment of code glosses and transitional devices. This can be attributed to their writing confidence in utilizing their native language for Americans, while second language for Filipinos. Cultural, political, and social realities also play a critical role in the utilization of metadiscoursal resources in writing.The pedagogical implications were provided for future research directions.
This study examines metadiscourse markers across a corpus of Estonian and Lithuanian journal articles in the field of linguistics. We aim to 1) compare the global use of all the metadiscourse markers across the languages and texts, making distinctions between these languages and specific academic journals, and 2) to discern whether similar and/or different patterns can be identified across the languages and whether such patterns also manifest across various academic journals. We find that Estonian writers use self-mentions more frequently in methods sections than Lithuanian counterparts. Comparing journals, the Lithuanian journal Kalbotyra shows more transition markers, code glosses, and endophoric markers, while the Estonian ERÜ aastaraamat relies more on transition markers in results and discussion sections. Despite discipline similarities, variations emerge in specific sections and interpersonal categories across languages and journals. The study provides insights into metadiscourse patterns and their role in different languages and academic contexts, offering potential guidance for future research and practice in non-English academic writing.*
The outbreak of highly contagious COVID-19 in the world has drawn considerable attention to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) because of their great advantage of liberating education from temporal and geographical restrictions. Compared with academic lectures and classroom teaching, MOOCs are featured by higher openness, briefer lectures, the invisibility of learners, and learners’ subjective initiative as the chief driving force.
This study aimed at examining the effects of corpus-based instruction on students’ critical skills in academic writing classes. It also endeavored to investigate the students’ perceptions towards corpus-based instruction. To conduct the research, a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental research design was employed. A total of 77 mechanical engineering students who took technical report writing course were selected using multi-stage sampling techniques. The data gathering instruments were academic writing tests, textual analyses, questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Independent and paired sample t-tests and thematic analyses were employed to analyze the data. Hence, the results indicated that the students who were instructed their academic writing skills through corpus-based instruction improved their critical thinking skills better than their counterparts who were instructed through the conventional instructional approach. Particularly, students who were instructed through corpus-based instruction employed appropriate lexical bundles and metadiscourse devices to express their argument and persuade their readers than the comparison group. Additionally, the data confirmed that students’ reacted positively towards the corpus-based instruction. Consequently, this research calls for EFL instructors to consider authentic linguistic features to enhance their students’ critical thinking skills in academic writing skills classes.
Audience metadiscourse refers to the speech choices made by the speakers to indicate their metapragmatic awareness of the audience. It encompasses expressions including directly referring to the audience as “you” and “we”, generic expressions, imperative expressions, and rhetorical interrogative expressions. This study primarily focuses on describing and analyzing the representational forms, pragmatic functions, and different metapragmatic awareness reflected in audience metadiscourse in self-built corpus of Chinese-American new year speeches during about ten years. This study helps to enrich the dimensions of metapragmatic analysis by focusing on the pragmatic functions and usage of audience discourse from the perspective of the audience, highlighting the interpersonal and interactive nature of language use.
Consideramos que, a la hora de analizar cómo producen nuestros alumnos sus textos académicos, hay que tener en cuenta el contexto lingüístico, cultural y tecnológico que los rodea, así como la forma que tienen de interactuar. Atendiendo a este contexto, podremos darnos cuenta de que lo que les pedimos no solo es un esfuerzo lingüístico enorme para ellos, sino que, además, está alejado completamente de su realidad comunicativa. En este trabajo tratamos el contexto lingüístico personal de nuestro alumnado, introduciendo de esta manera una nueva perspectiva a la hora de acercarnos a los problemas que tienen los estudiantes universitarios para redactar escritos académicos. Siendo conscientes de que no han contado con la preparación adecuada, ofrecemos algunas pautas que, desde el punto de vista pragmático, pueden servir para hacer menos patentes esas carencias, pues solo con la práctica detenida de las distintas destrezas que se exigen para redactar este tipo de escritos podrían obtener los resultados deseados
A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring text, stored electronically and used in the descriptive analysis of a language. Specialized language corpora are particularly relevant to the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), where the restricted target audience limits publishers' willingness to invest in materials production. However, the need for specialized materials is clear-large variability has been found to exist between different academic disciplines in terms of word frequencies, collocational patterns and rhetorical moves. This paper describes a corpus-based investigation of the 8 million word Specialized Corpus of Civil Engineering Research Articles (SCCERA), developed at the University of X. A keyword analysis was first performed in order to identify pedagogically useful words typical in civil engineering research articles. These were then compared with established external wordlists (the General Service List and the Academic Wordlist) to categorize keywords into those: (i) commonly occurring in general English; (ii) commonly occurring in academic English, and (iii) not occurring in either the GSL or AWL. Keywords in the 11 sub-disciplines of civil engineering displayed marked heterogeneity, raising questions about exactly how specialized a corpus needs to be in order to be of pedagogic value. In a separate 'cluster analysis', 3-, 4-, 5-and 6-word combinations were extracted in order to identify fixed expressions typical of the field. These were found to typically belong to one of five categories: (i) cause and effect language; (ii) comparison and contrast language; (iii) language of quantification; (iv) deictic language; (v) language showing the writer's stance. The pedagogic implications of these finding are discussed.
Investigation into metadiscourse use in master’s thesis Introductions across disciplines is arguably rare. Thus, this paper examined the use of metadiscourse devices in the Introduction Chapters in English Language and Sociology master’s thesis. The metadiscoursal devices in a corpus drawn from the Introduction Chapters of 20 English Language and Sociology master’s theses were manually coded, drawing on the modified version of Hyland’s metadiscourse model. The results revealed that there were marked cross-disciplinary quantitative differences across the metadiscoursal subcategories (contra attitude markers). Regarding interactive subcategories except frame markers, the rest were more frequent in English Language Introduction Chapter (ELIC) than in Sociology Introduction Chapter (SIC). On the other hand, all the interactional subcategories (except attitude markers) were significantly frequent in ELIC. The findings have implications for the teaching of metadiscoursal resources in English for Research Purposes (ERP), and further studies into chapterology.
Keywords: chapterology, continuants, evidentials, hedges, metadiscourse
This study examined disciplinary rhetoric in research articles, focusing on different traditions in structuring text discourses from a metadiscourse-move analytic approach. The corpus consisted of 72 research article Introductions (RAIs): 36 in applied linguistics and 36 in chemistry. Swales' CARS model (1990, 2004) and Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse (2005) were used as analytical frameworks for move and metadiscourse analyses, respectively. Both frequency and functional analyses showed that there were considerable differences between the 2 disciplines in terms of how the writers used metadiscourse in the RAIs and how the metadiscourse markers were mapped to fulfill the rhetorical purposes of Introduction moves. Such discrepancies reflect the susceptibility of metadiscursive features to the sociorhetorical cultures conditioned by the discipline to which the writers belong. Findings have implications for teaching novices, especially nonnative speakers of English, to write research articles and help them create a convincing research space and make appropriate use of metadiscourse.
Stance and voice are two crucial elements of social interactions in academic writing. However, their conceptual constructs are elusive and their linguistic realisation is not fully explored. A relatively overlooked feature is the “noun + that” structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause (as advantage that in Flow cytometry offers the advantage that long term is available). This construction allows a writer to express authorial stance towards complement content and attribute a voice to that stance through pre-modification. This paper examines this construction in a corpus of 60 journal articles across six disciplines extracted from the BNC corpus. Developing an expressive classification of stance nouns and the possible voice categorisation, this study shows that the structure is not only widely used to project stance and voice, but that it displays considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.
Academic book reviews published in academic journals are expected to provide readers with both positive and negative evaluation of the book under review. This academic genre has recently been the focus of increasing number of studies due to its evaluative and interactional nature. The present cross-cultural study aimed to explore how interpersonal metadiscourse was used in Turkish and English book reviews. The corpus used in this study consisted of 150 published book reviews from different disciplines in English and Turkish. In order to understand how writers engaged in their reviews and interacted with their readers, Hyland's (2000) metadiscourse model was used to identify interpersonal markers in book reviews. With a focus of five common features from this model, hedges, emphatics (boosters), attitude markers, relational markers, and person markers were used as categories to be investigated. Relying on a quantitative data analysis followed by qualitative analysis, it was found that the total number of interpersonal metadiscourse features was considerably higher in the English corpus than in the Turkish corpus. Two languages showed variations particularly in the use of hedging devices which help writers to tone down their statements. Particularly learners in academic contexts can gain awareness of how various academic genres are realized in different cultures based on the findings.
The first part the reviewers of journals article read in any research is its abstract. It tells the summary of the research and
defines the language used by the researcher. Thus, well-written abstract is necessary for all academic writers who consider
publishing their papers. Certainly, writers could find it difficult to write abstract if they are not very familiar with the moves and
the linguistic features associated with it. Therefore, this study aims to explore the rhetorical moves in the abstracts of 59
published research articles selected from two disciplines specified in English. Furthermore, it examines the verb tense and the
metadiscourse features in each move. All Research Articles (RAs) were published in Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences &
Humanities from 2011 until 2015. Two models proposed by Hyland in (2000) and (2005) were used as analytical frameworks in
the present study. The findings showed that some rhetorical moves seemed to have higher occurrences than the others.
Regarding the verb tense, present tense was found to be more preferable tense in the process of writing abstract. Moreover,
interactive metadiscourse features appeared more frequently than interactional features.
The research article is one of the widely practiced genres of communication among members of academic discourse community to contribute their own new knowledge and get acceptance from the audience. A generic analysis of research articles can cover a wide variety of issues; among them rhetorical features. As argued by Hyland (2004), a valuable means of exploring academic writing and of comparing the rhetorical features and preferences of different discourse communities is through metadiscoursal analysis. Metadiscourse is an aspect of language which provides a link between texts and disciplinary cultures, helping to define the rhetorical context by revealing some of the expectations and understandings of the audience for whom a text is written. Differences in metadiscourse patterns may prove to be an essential means of distinguishing discourse communities (Hyland, 1998). The present paper focused on interactional metadiscourse markers in the result and discussion section of academic research articles across four disciplines, namely, English Language Teaching, Civil Engineering, Biology, and Economics. Sixteen research article result and discussion sections (4 from each discipline) were sourced from four leading international journals for analysis. Results revealed that there were worth-pointing differences, but not statistically significant differences excepting in terms of boosters, between disciplines in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers. Similarities and differences are explained by way of an explication of genre features in terms of contextual configuration and genre specific needs dealing with applied metadiscourse markers by discipline.
Hedges and boosters as meta-discourse markers have been the focus of many studies. There may be cross-cultural difference among the users of these markers. This comparative study intends to compare the use of these markers between two mass-circulation newspapers in Iran and the United States, Keyhan and Washington Post, respectively, about the Eleventh course of presidential election in Iran. To this end, articles of seven days before and seven days after the election of these two newspapers were gathered. Both textual and quantitative analyses were done by the researchers. One-way ANOVA was conducted to compare means of the use of hedges and boosters in these two newspapers. The findings of this corpus analysis showed that more boosters and more hedges were used by Keyhan and Washington Post respectively. It was also revealed by the finding that there is a significant relationship between Keyhan and Washington Post on the use of hedges and boosters before and after the election.
The present study was conducted to investigate the misuses of two main categories of metadiscourse markers used by a group of university students. To this end, 50 EFL learners of intermediate language proficiency level were chosen by means of administering a TOEFL proficiency test. The participants were female junior students majoring in English literature at Kerman Azad University.These learners were regarded as intermediate ones scoring 400-550 in the proficiency test. Then, the learners were provided with an argumentative topic to write a 250-word essay in 45 minutes. The number of misuses of metadiscourse markers were counted with regard to their use of textual and interpersonal markers of this kind, and the subcategories of textual (logical connectives, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and code glosses), and the subcategories of interpersonal metadiscourse markers (hedges, emphatics, attitude markers, relational markers, and person markers). Moreover, different classifications of misuses were explored. The results of Chi-square analysis indicated that misuses of metadiscourse makers can be due to overuse of these markers (e.g. logical connective and person markers), punctuation,interlingua, and intralinguaerrors. Finally, using a Pearson correlation to investigate the correlation between the participants’ TOEFL score and essay score, it was concluded that language proficiency has a positive relationship with the uses of metadiscourse markers and essays quality.
This study focused on how second/foreign language writers enact, construct, and invent themselves through writing. Hyland's model of metadiscourse (2004a) used as the analytical tool for analyzing texts. Based on a corpus of 30 research articles, the overall distribution of evidential markers, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions were calculated across four rhetorical sections (Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Discussion and Conclusion) of the research articles. According to the results, identity is a critical aspect of writing and that it should be brought into the mainstream of second/foreign language writing pedagogy through consciousness raising or the specific teaching of certain features.
The present study aims to investigate cultural variations in the use of metadiscourse between Turkish and USA postgraduate students’ abstracts in MA thesis written in English. The taxonomy was borrowed from Hyland (2005). The corpora in the present study comprise a total of 52 thesis abstracts written in English from the department of English Language Teaching, 26 thesis from USA students and 26 from Turkish students. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to analyse the texts in the corpora. The analysis revealed that there were some cultural differences in the amounts and types of metadiscourse. The incidence of evidential, endophorics, code glosses, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions were fewer in Turkish students’ master thesis abstracts. However, Turkish students used metadiscourse transitions, frame markers and hedges more than USA students. Pedagogical implications were provided in light of empirical data.
The purpose of this study was twofold. First, an attempt was made to systematically characterize Book Reviews (BRs) as an academic written genre in terms of the elements of transitivity system. Secondly, the effect of disciplinary variation on the lexico-grammatical features of this genre was explored. To this end, a corpus of 90 academic BRs from discipline-related professional journals (physics, sociology, and literature) were randomly selected and analyzed. Significant differences were observed in terms of both the type and frequency of processes and participants. This, it seems, points to a difference in the semantic configuration of BRs peculiar to each discipline, although they all seem to fulfill a similar communicative purpose— evaluating knowledge production in the academic milieu. To be more specific, the observed features indicate that BRs in physics journals, as compared to their counterparts in sociology and literature journals, appear to carry a higher percentage of passive construction, non-human concrete participants, and of relational and existential processes, together with a lower percentage of specific human participants; hence, leading to texts heavily laden with grammatical metaphor and impersonality.
This book presents an investigation of lexical bundles in native and non-native scientific writing in English, whose aim is to produce a frequency-derived, statistically- and qualitatively-refined list of the most pedagogically useful lexical bundles in scientific prose: one that can be sorted and filtered by frequency, key word, structure and function, and includes contextual information such as variations, authentic examples and usage notes. The first part of the volumediscusses the creation of this list based on a multimillion-word corpus of biomedical research writing and reveals the structure and functions of lexical bundles and their role in effective scientific communication. A comparative analysis of a non-native corpus highlights non-native scientists’ difficulties in employing lexical bundles. The second part of the volume explores pedagogical applications and provides a series of teaching activities that illustrate how EAP teachers or materials designers can use the list of lexical bundles in their practice.
This study examined disciplinary rhetoric in research articles, focusing on different traditions in structuring text discourses from a metadiscourse-move analytic approach. The corpus consisted of 72 research article Introductions (RAIs): 36 in applied linguistics and 36 in chemistry. Swales' CARS model (1990, 2004) and Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse (2005) were used as analytical frameworks for move and metadiscourse analyses, respectively. Both frequency and functional analyses showed that there were considerable differences between the 2 disciplines in terms of how the writers used metadiscourse in the RAIs and how the metadiscourse markers were mapped to fulfill the rhetorical purposes of Introduction moves. Such discrepancies reflect the susceptibility of metadiscursive features to the sociorhetorical cultures conditioned by the discipline to which the writers belong. Findings have implications for teaching novices, especially nonnative speakers of English, to write research articles and help them create a convincing research space and make appropriate use of metadiscourse.
Informed by the need to study metadiscourse, the present study aimed to compare book reviews and blurbs as examples of disinterested and interested genres in four disciplines of applied linguistics, literature, history, and psychology. The study relied on two corpora: (a) 200 book reviews in each discipline between 2005 and 2015 and (b) 4,282 blurbs in the above disciplines within the same time span. To analyse the texts, Hyland's (2005a) classification of metadiscourse markers was employed. The findings of the study showed that the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in blurbs and book reviews are genre dependent. Generally, metadiscourse markers were preponderant in the book reviews than in the blurbs (43.3 vs. 32.8 per 1,000 words), which can be ascribed to the functionally dissimilar communicative purposes of the two genres. The insights gained from this study make noteworthy contributions to our understanding of these genres and of how markers of evaluation are verbalized across disciplines and across genres.
The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in The British Medical Journal in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.
Metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners – is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, pragmatics and language teaching. This interest has grown up over the past 40 years driven by a dual purpose. The first is a desire to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of use. That is, how individuals use language to orient to and interpret particular communicative situations, and especially how they draw on their understandings of these to make their intended meanings clear to their interlocutors. The second is to employ this knowledge in the service of language and literacy education. But while many researchers and teachers find it to be a conceptually rich and analytically powerful idea, it is not without difficulties of definition, categorisation and analysis. In this paper I explore the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and map its influence and directions through a state of the art analysis of the main online academic databases and current published research.
The aim of this chapter is to identify relationships between phraseology and epistemology in the discourses of two humanities disciplines, history and literary criticism. The empirical focus of the chapter will be on two large computerized corpora of book review texts compiled from academic journals in these two disciplines. Using the tools and methods of corpus-driven linguistics (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001; Hunston, 2002; Sinclair, 2003, 2004), I will show how one of the core epistemological values of history and literary criticism as humanities disciplines is reflected in a range of notable phraseological features in the peer review genres represented by these two corpora.
This chapter explores a review genre — the book review article — that is something of a hybrid. It often appears in the book review section of academic journals yet differs from both book reviews and review articles. Its primary function is to evaluate the knowledge claims of other researchers in the context of their publications. This is clearly different from a book review which functions to evaluate a range of features of books (Hyland, 2000).
In review genres the control of evaluative resources is central to both effective writing and authorial identity. The ways in which writers judge others’ work and express these judgements in their texts not only signals what they think, but also who they are, displaying both their status as disciplinary insiders and their individual competences and values. In other words, and in an important sense, we are what we write, and what we write in review texts is a discursive construction of self through evaluation. In this chapter we explore the role of gender and discipline in the performance of such an academic identity by examining a corpus of reviews, written by men and women, in the contrasting fields of philosophy and biology.
This comparative study draws on an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine disciplinary and paradigmatic influences on the use of interactional metadiscourse in the post-method sections of 120 research articles. These research articles were drawn from three social science disciplines (i.e., applied linguistics, education, and psychology) and two research paradigms (i.e., quantitative and qualitative research). Quantitative analyses showed that the applied linguistics and education research articles used boosters more frequently than the psychology research articles. Furthermore, the applied linguistics subcorpus deployed more reader references but fewer self-mentions than the psychology subcorpus. Cross-paradigmatic comparisons revealed that the quantitative research articles made more frequent use of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers as a main type, and directives as a subtype than the qualitative research articles. Qualitative analyses identified additional cross-disciplinary and cross-paradigmatic differences in the choice or function of specific metadiscoursal resources. These observed differences are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms.
This article presents a qualitative, comparative study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of undergraduate students working in two different disciplines. The groups of students were: 1) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the medium of English. For each group of students, we examined writing undertaken in two undergraduate disciplinary courses: Literary Criticism and Translation Studies. Our aim was to extend research into English writing by L1 Mandarin speakers, and to identify patterns of difference and similarity both between educational contexts and between disciplines. Results suggest that patterns of metadiscourse use in our corpus are associated with both disciplinary and contextual factors, but that contextual factors may have a stronger effect than disciplinary factors. For our data, local institutional culture seems to have a noticeable influence on student writers' use of metadiscourse.
A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers. This study aimed to explore how interactive metadiscourse markers are deployed by research article abstract writers belonging to different disciplinary communities within the soft sciences, while trying to reach the audience by creating a well-organized discourse. Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to analyze 60 research article abstracts written in Applied Linguistics and Economics. Based on the results, there were marked variations found across the two disciplines in terms of interactive metadiscourse markers.
In his preface, Joseph M. Williams says that Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace focuses on “the single most serious problem that mature writers face: a wordy, tangled, too-complex prose style.” His book deals with that problem admirably. Indeed, the advice and examples furnished by Williams are varied and sophisticated enough to make it a useful resource for any mature writer — even the mature writer whose prose is clear and concise.
Engagement markers are crucial interpersonal tools to interact with readers and draw support for the writer's positions. However, little is known about the effect of the writer's cultural background and language, as well as the context of publication, on the way authors use these strategies. The present study provides a quantitative and contrastive analysis based on a corpus consisting of business management articles written in different cultures and languages (Anglophone/English vs. Spanish) and aimed at different contexts of publication (local vs. international). The results obtained indicate that, although context of publication and national culture are powerful factors regulating the use of these strategies, other aspects such as L1 transfer and L2 proficiency may have some bearing on the use of these resources. Los marcadores de compromiso (engagement markers) constituyen unas herramientas interpersonales cruciales en escritura académica, dado que permiten al autor interactuar con sus lectores y obtener su apoyo para los argumentos presentados. No obstante, sabemos relativamente poco sobre el efecto que la lengua y la cultura del autor, así como el contexto de publicación, pueden tener sobre el uso de estas estrategias. Este artículo presenta un estudio contrastivo cuantitativo elaborado a partir de un corpus de artículos de Organización de Empresa escritos en diferentes culturas y lenguas (inglés y anglófona vs. castellano y española) y dirigido a diferentes contextos de publicación (local vs. Internacional). Los resultados obtenidos indican que, aunque el contexto de publicación y la cultura y/o lengua de origen son factores importantes en el uso de estas estrategias, otros aspectos como la transferencia desde la lengua materna y el nivel de dominio de la L2 (inglés) pueden tener también una notable influencia.
This paper deals with interpersonality in research article abstracts analysed in terms of interactional metadiscourse. The evolution in the distribution of three prominent interactional markers comprised in Hyland's (2005a) model, viz. hedges, boosters and attitude markers, is investigated in three decades of abstract writing in the field of applied linguistics in the broad sense. On the basis of a quantitative corpus survey of abstracts in Journal of Pragmatics, two major points are made. One is that the distribution of hedges, boosters and attitude markers in abstracts, when compared with their distribution in research articles, supports the idea that abstracts are not just pale reflections of the full-length articles, but rather have a specific make-up, which can plausibly be linked to their function. The second point is that the use of interactional metadiscourse in abstracts has undergone interesting changes in the course of the past 30 years. On the whole, the degree of interpersonality realised by hedges, boosters and attitude markers diminishes over time, though notable differences exist with regard to the subcategories in the interactional domain. In the discussion section, we try to arrive at an explanation for the changes that have occurred, taking genre, discourse community, research practice and rhetoric strategy into account.
Thèse (Ph. D.) -- University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Bibliogr.: f. 199-208. Photocopie.
Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic material referring to the evolving text and to the writer and imagined reader of that text. It is based on a view of writing as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways that writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the propositional content and the audience of the text. Despite considerable interest in metadiscourse by teachers and applied linguists, however, it has failed to achieve its explanatory potential due to a lack of theoretical rigour and empirical confusion. Based on an analysis of 240 L2 postgraduate dissertations totalling 4 million words, we offer a reassessment of metadiscourse, propose what we hope is a more robust model, and use this to explore how these students used metadiscourse. Essentially our argument is that metadiscourse offers a way of understanding the interpersonal resources writers use to present propositional material and therefore a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities.
Exploring disciplinary variation in the generic structure and metadiscourse features of online academic book blurbs
- M R Atai
- M R Asghari
- MR Atai
Metadiscourse in research articles: A comparative study across disciplines and research paradigms
- F Cao
Words of written discourse: A genre-based view
- V K Bhatia
- VK Bhatia
Metadiscourse and genre learning: English argumentative writing by Chinese undergraduates
- L Lu
Metadiscourse, discourse, and issues in composition and rhetoric
- W J Vande Kopple
- WJ Vande Kopple
Afunctional investigation of self-mention in soft science Master theses
- S Asari
- D Kuhi
Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing
- K Hyland
English engagement markers: A comparison of humanities and Science Journals
- R Sahragard
- S Yazdanpanahi
Roles of moves, tenses and metadiscourse in the abstract of an acceptable research article
- Y Al-Shujairi
- M Yau
- J Buba
Metadiscourse in academic writing: An investigation of graduate students’ MA thesis in Taiwan
- C Lin
Book reviewing in the social sciences
- L Riley
- E Spreitzer
Metadiscourse, discourse, and issues in composition and rhetoric
- WJ Vande Kopple
- F Barton
- C Stygall
Some explanatory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication
- W J Vande Kopple
- WJ Vande Kopple