A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Research Article Introductions Of Chinese And English Linguistic Journals

Metadiscourse refers to "aspects of a text which explicitly organize the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer’s attitudes"(Hyland,1998). Recently, increasing studies focusing on metadiscourse have been carried out in various genres. However, the contrastive analysis of the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese research article (henceforth RA) introductions in the field of linguistics is somehow ignored. This study therefore tires to fulfill the gap.Within the the framework of Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, the present study examines the general distribution of metadiscourse devices as well as the linguistic preferences of each metadiscourse items in both English and Chinese RA introductions. Furthermore, the study also tries to account for the similarities and differences between the two data. To achieve these, this study analyzes60RA introductions (30Chinese and30English) extracted from two leading journals in the field of linguistics, which were published in the period of2008-2012.Statistical results indicate that there are similarities in the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese RA introductions:(1) more interactive metadiscourse devices are employed than interactional ones in both of the two data;(2) within the interactive subcategories, transitions and evidentials are among the top two interactive metadiscourse devices, followed by code glosses and frame markers;(3) within the interactional metadiscourse subcategory, attitude markers and boosters are the least used by both English and Chinese writers;(4) writers of both English and Chinese use hedges to withhold their full commitment. However, there do exist some differences:(1) there is a lower density of metadiscourse devices used in Chinese RA introductions than in English ones;(2) in the interactional subcategory, self-mentions appear in a high frequency in English RA introductions, while in Chinese RA introductions, no occurrence of self-mentions is found;(3) Chinese RA introduction writers use no boosters and attitude markers at all, while in English data, such occurrences are available, though not so frequent.With such similarities in the use of metadiscourse, the present study argues that: firstly, generic and pragmatic features common of both English and Chinese RA introductions may provide us with an explanation; secondly, English as an international language may have impact on Chinese academic writing. With regard to the differences, we assume that it is due to both pragmatic and socio-cultural reasons across the two languages.We argue that the present study offers insight to the illustration of how metadiscourse devices are realized in the genre of RA introductions. Besides, it will also provide us with a new perspective for study on the characteristics of RA introductions and thus fulfill the theory to some extent.