A Diachronic Study Of Metadiscourse In Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the diachronic evolution of doctoral dissertation writing in terms of interactive and interactional metadiscourse at three time intervals of 1966,1986,and 2016 through examining the salient textual features and pattern of change involved in the metadiscourse in question.The practice of interactional metadiscourse demonstrates that the writer is taking the reader into consideration the deployment of which makes the text less formal.Interactive metadiscourse has a major role in composing reader-friendly and persuasive texts.One hundred and eighty authentic doctoral dissertations were retrieved from hard and soft disciplines which generated a 5.16 million words corpus.Hyland’s(2005a & 2005b)interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to examine the evolution pattern and the disciplinary similarities and differences through analyzing the frequency of occurrence,percentage of change,metadiscoursal proportions and significance of the change.Main findings are generated as follows: 1)There is a steady decline in interactional metadiscourse(stance and engagement)across soft disciplines with a reverse pattern across hard disciplines;2)There is a decrease in interactive metadiscourse across soft disciplines with a reverse trend across hard disciplines.Findings show that academic writing is inclined to be moving toward more objective and audience responsible texts in soft disciplines whereas hard disciplines are moving towards more subjective and author responsible texts.Also,the former gets less persuasive and writer-oriented while the latter appears to be more persuasive and reader-friendly.The study indicates that doctoral dissertation writing has been changing dramatically over time.The dissertation has further extended the longitudinal studies on research genre(Gillaerts,2014;Hyland & Jiang,2016 a,2016b,2018).The study implies that writers need to compose their texts according to the norms of their respective communities.In hard disciplines writers manipulate texts to make it more interesting and understandable for a wider audience of diverse expertise and in soft disciplines writers try to shape their texts to address a more specialized audience as their peers in sciences do because such writing is more favored by academia.Based on the findings,a theoretical model of academic writing evolution is proposed in the hope of offering pedagogical implications for better understanding and constructing academic writing across disciplines for non-native and native doctoral students’ dissertation writing in non-Anglophone and Anglophone contexts.