Exploring Interactional Metadiscourse in Research Articles of Social and Natural Sciences

This study investigated the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) across four disciplines of English research articles (RAs), namely Applied Linguistics, Psychology (labeled soft disciplines), Chemistry and Medicine (labeled hard disciplines), in order to spot any probable differences between the Introduction (Int) and Result/Discussion (RD) sections of those RAs. At first, a total of 120 RAs were selected (30 articles for each discipline). The Int and RD sections were extracted and then were compared as to their use of IMMs using Hyland’s (2005) model.During the corpus analysis, the IMMs were manually and carefully counted by the researcher and then by a second rater. The obtained results were averaged out to yield one more reliable set of data. The frequencies obtained per 1,000 words and then the Chi-square test was run. The results of statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference between soft and hard disciplines in the employment of IMMs throughout the whole corpus when subsections were compared. On the whole, this study suggests that IMMs are valuable rhetorical means which are believed not only to help writers to write better but also to facilitate the reading process for readers.

Keywords:

Discourse Analysis , Metadiscourse , Metadiscourse Marker , Interactional Metadiscourse , Research Articles