| Engagement, which is reader-oriented and focuses on interaction with readers toachieve interactional aims, reveals its position and influence in academic writing to agreater extend. Previous studies on metadiscourse mainly focus on the authorial referencesand stance or comparison with engagement. Single research on engagement is absent inacademics, not to mention the comparative studies.This article is an empirical research based on two corpora consisting of single-authored articles with a total of404,375words from famous international journals whichaims to explore the similarities and differences of academic writing in natural science andsocial science as well as probable reasons. The author first tagged the featured words andphrases under the direction of Hyland’s theoretical categories of engagement, and thencounted the amount of each item before using SPSS to analyze the characteristics of thetwo sets of data.The author finds reader pronouns, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge,directives and questions perform some similarities and differences in the natural researcharticles and social ones. The total amount of engagement resources in social science ismuch larger than that in natural science, while the mostly used items in the two fields arethe same-directives and reader pronouns. Writers from social science conduct moreinteraction with readers and tend to use rich featured words, expressions and structures;while writers from natural science interact less frequently with readers, who prefer to useprecise engagement features. The different needs of reader groups and their currentcapabilities are key factors influencing the use of engagement resources.This article explores the features and the role of engagement in research articles ofdifferent scientific fields, expecting to enrich metadiscourse research and to offer somehints on how to establish a good relationship with writer and readers through engagement. |
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