| As is well known, communicative discourse generally contains two levels: primary discourse and metadiscourse. Metadiscourse is"discourse about discourse". It does not add propositional meaning to the content, but refers to the aspects of a text which explicitly organize the discourse, express the writer's attitude and engage the reader in the communicative interaction. Metadiscourse includes two major categories, namely, interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. Scholars both at home and abroad have done lots of empirical and theoretical studies on metadiscourse, most of which focus on comparisons of metadiscourse use between two or more cultural background, but the comparative study of metadiscourse in the texts of natural science and social science has not been found yet.Based on Ken Hyland (2005)'s theoretical framework and categorization of metadiscourse, the paper adopts a scientific methodology of corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study to investigate the distribution feature and application of metadiscourse in the texts in the fields of social science and natural science. The study aims to find out the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse in research articles between natural science and social science, and analyzes the possible reasons for the differences. After a detailed quantitative analysis, the author sums up the regularities of metadiscourse use by researchers in the two fields and provides some suggestions for academic writing teaching across fields, discourse analysis, and the study of statistic features of research articles, etc.Two corpora of research articles are established, one is natural science corpus, and the other is social science corpus. All the RAs are randomly selected from outstanding international journals in the year of 2008. Metadiscourse devices in the two corpora are annotated manually as precise as one could. By means of the Conc300 tool of Wordsmith, the frequencies and distribution regularities in the two fields, across disciplines and in four sections have been separately calculated and analyzed.The results reveal that there are similarities in the use of metadiscourse devices in both the two corpora. Metadiscourse devices are widely employed in research articles by researchers in both fields and play a very important part in the organization of text structure and interaction between the writer and the reader. Differences lie in the fact that the number of metadiscourse in social science is far more than that in natural science. In the aspect of interactional metadiscourse, the use of hedges, self mentions and attitude markers in social science is larger, more extensive and more flexible. Besides, there are also substantial differences in each part of the discourse and in each discipline. These differences in turn help realize field features of various discourses.The possible reasons might be diverse. From the perspective of Functional Linguistics, the difference of register, namely, the difference of field and tenor results in the difference of mode. Besides, the differences of research contents and methods in the two fields, and disciplinary cultural varieties lead to differences in the researchers'thinking patterns, perspectives of observing a problem, and thus determine the forms of language expression, etc. Understanding the similarities and differences as well as the possible reasons will be significant to the correct discourse comprehension and analysis in different fields. It will be meaningful in raising learners'field awareness in discourse analysis and improving their English reading and writing quality. It is hopeful that the research results in this thesis will be of some help for learners in their study of reading and writing academic papers, and have some guiding function in how to correctly use metadiscourse devices in research articles. |
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