Reza Abdi - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Iran.
Parisa Ahmadi - ELT Instructor, Payam Noor University, Ardabil Branch, Iran.

Metadiscourse refers to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement. This study draws on an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine disciplinary influences on the use of interactive metadiscourse in the Introduction sections of research articles. The study examined the distributions of interactive metadiscourse markers in a corpus of 120 RAs represented four academic disciplines (30 from each discipline). Physics and medicine were selected from hard disciplines and Applied linguistics and Economics from soft disciplines to shed some light on the ways academic writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre to persuade readers in their own discourse community. No statistically significant difference was achieved by functional-contextual analysis in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers across disciplines. The analysis suggested how academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. The findings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and for novice writers who would like to publish their research in academic journals.

Academic writing, Genre analysis, Interactive metadiscourse markers, Metadiscourse, Research articles