| As an integrated part of discourse, metadiscourse assists authors in organizing their discourses and guiding readers’comprehension, as well as helps them negotiate and interact with their readers to involve them into active interpretation of discourses. In recent years, studies on metadiscourse have aroused interests from linguistic scholars, language teachers and users, especially its application into research articles (RAs). Scholars abroad and at home have done some empirical researches with foci on metadiscourse in different disciplines or in English RAs by scholars with different language backgrounds. However, few comparative studies have been conducted on metadiscourse between different languages, specifically, between English and Chinese.Therefore, in this study we intend to compare the application of metadiscourse in English abstracts by native English speakers and Chinese abstracts by native Chinese speakers. Petroleum RAs have long been neglected by linguistic scholars, no systematic studies being found on this type of RAs. Due to their significance in petroleum field and the characteristics of our university, we take petroleum RAs as our subjects. Highly condensed, abstracts play a critical part in the publication of RAs. Consequently, we narrow down our subjects to include only petroleum RA abstracts with the intention of revealing similarities and differences in metadiscourse uses in English and Chinese petroleum RA abstracts, finding reasons for similarities and differences and summarizing the distribution rule of metadiscourse. We hope that our study will be of help to scholars not only in Chinese petroleum circle but also in other academic circles when they compose RA abstracts.Two corpora (English petroleum RA abstracts corpus (EA) and Chinese petroleum RA abstracts corpus (CA)) are built with180abstracts from six prestigious journals (three English and three Chinese). All language materials are manually annotated on the basis of the interpersonal model of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland (2008). Wordsmith5.0is employed to retrieve metadiscourse items for their occurrences. The results are as follows:1. In both corpora, metadiscourse devices occur quite frequently, where1888occurrences in EA and938in CA. The devices are obviously overused in EA, with frequency per1000words being74.57for EA and42.97for CA. Chi-square calculation shows a significant difference between two corpora. What is worth our particular attention is that all metadiscourse devices are found in EA while three are absent from CA, which are endophoric markers, evidentials and self mentions.2. A comparison between interactive devices and interactional devices shows an overuse of interactional devices in both corpora.3. The intra-corpus comparison finds that metadiscourse devices are unevenly distributed across three moves within a same corpus, move three having the biggest number of occurrences. The inter-corpora comparison finds that metadiscourse devices are overused in all three moves from EA despite a similar distribution tendency within the same move across two corpora.4. We attribute these differences to the innate structural features of the two languages, influences of different cultures on writing patterns, and specific requirements put forward by Chinese journals.In conclusion, this study proves a big gap in metadiscourse use between English and Chinese petroleum RA abstracts. Multi-angle comparison can provide us with a profound understanding about the application of metadiscourse in English and Chinese academic genre. We hope that our study will draw Chinese scholars’ attention to the use of metadiscourse in academic field and thus arouse their metadiscourse awareness. In particular, when they are composing English RA abstracts, they should consciously make reasonable use of metadiscourse devices to achieve their communicative purposes. Besides, we also hope that this study can offer some insights into RA instruction. |
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