The Metadiscourse Of Sino-American Doctoral Dissertations In Linguistics

Metadiscourse guides readers to comprehend the text and establishes the relationships between the writer and readers. Over the past decades, it has attracted growing attentions of researchers who did a large number of studies on metadiscourse use in academic writing. However, the Introduction section of dissertations remains an overlooked area and few studies have compared how native and non-native English writers employ metadiscourse in English-language writings.To bridge the research gaps, this study adopts Hyland’s (2005) classification of metadiscourse to investigate metadiscourse use in the Introduction sections of Sino-American doctoral dissertations in the field of Linguistics. Based on a corpus of 56 Introduction sections of Sino-American doctoral dissertations from 25 universities, this study attempts to explore the overall features of metadiscourse use in Sino-American Introduction sections and examine the similarities and differences between them in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse.Results showed that, in general, interactive metadiscourse was used more frequently than interactional metadiscourse. Whereas no significant difference was found in the use of transitions and evidentials between the two sets of Introduction sections, the American Introduction sections presented a significantly higher inclusion of six sub-categories, i.e., endophoric markers, code-glosses, hedges, boosters, self mentions and engagement markers. Qualitatively, interactive metadiscourse served similar functions but with diversified linguistic forms in the two groups of data. Qualitative similarities and differences were also found in the use of interactional metadiscourse.The above results indicated that metadiscourse mainly performed interactive functions in the Introduction sections of Sino-American doctoral dissertations in Linguistics. Moreover, due to the disparities in fields like socio-culture, the layout of the Introduction sections and the writers’English proficiency, the American sub-corpus emp(?)ed a larger quantity of metadiscourse in more linguistic forms. Given the importance of (?)adiscourse in dissertation writing, educators are encouraged to explore efficient teaching methods to assist students in learning metadiscourse. As for students, more reading of international academic articles is recommended to get acquainted with the literal and pragmatic meanings of metadiscourse expressions. In addition, assessments of dissertations are supposed to take greater account of the writing skills of the author.