| Metadiscourse is an important linguistic resource employed by writers to signaltheir attitude towards the relationship among writers, the content of the discourse andreaders. Recently, there have been growing research studies focusing onmetadiscourse resources in a wide range of genres. However, little attention has beenpaid to the analysis of the use of metadiscourse in research article abstracts.Based on Hyland‘s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the presentstudy examines the distribution of metadiscourse resources in research articleabstracts. Furthermore, this study examines which metadiscourse resourcespredominate in research article abstracts and how they are distributed with regard tolinguistic preferences. To this end, this study analyzes the interactive and interactionalresources found in a corpus of60English research article abstracts from two journalsin the field of applied linguistics. In order to have a highly representative data,research article abstracts in our corpus were chosen from two leading journals in thefield of applied linguistics, which were published between the year2009and2011.The findings show that metadiscourse resources have their presence in the corpusexcept endophoric markers, indicating that the use of interpersonal metadiscourse iscommon in English research article abstracts. It is also found that transitions, hedgescode glosses and frame markers are among the top ranked metadiscourse resources interms of frequency of occurrence. In terms of linguistic forms used in eachmetadiscourse category, certain preferences are also found such as the great use ofcontrastive transitions, relatively frequent use of frame markers to sequence andannounce goals, the relatively high presence of expressions of importance in attitudemarkers and high frequency of self mentions in the corpus. The study concludes witha discussion of possible explanations for these preferences in linguistic forms ofmetadiscourse resources. |
PDF Full Text Request