Cross-linguistic Study of textual Metadiscourse Markers in the Abstract Sections of National and International English AppliedLinguistics Conferences

The purpose of this study was to examine the distribution of textual metadiscourse markers in the abstract section ofnational and international English conferences in applied linguistics. To this end, a corpus of 30000 words wererandomly selected from the abstract section of national and international English conferences presented in the lastdecade and was analyzed using Kopple’s (1997) model of textual metadiscourse markers. The result revealed that therewere statistically significant differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in the abstract of national andinternational applied linguistics conferences, especially in the use of Logical Connectives, Illocution Markers, Hedges,Certainty Markers and Attributers.

Keywords:

metadiscourse markers , text connectives , textual function , applied linguistics , conference proceedings