A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Abstracts By Novices And Experts

As an important genre,academic discourse has been received extensive attention.Traditionally,academic discourse is supposed to be impersonal and formal and avoids the authors' subjective engagement and emotional penetration as much as possible.However,more and more people have realized that the author not only depicts the eternal reality but expresses his /her attitude and idea in academic writing in recent years.The abstract,the miniature of academic articles,has been a hot topic in the academic world.For readers,it is a vital access to capturing the information of articles as we ll as an important gist to evaluate the quality of study.Metadiscourse is a self-reflexive expression used for organizing discourse,taking the position and establishing social relation with readers.They are extensively employed in abstracts of academic writings to guide readers through the discourse.Recent years have witnessed a plenty of studies on metadiscourse in academic writings which concentrate on comparative analysis from cultural or disciplinary perspective.However,researches rarely involve metadiscourse use in abstracts produced by different academic communities.Based on Hyland's classification of metadiscourse,the study selects 100 English abstracts in linguistics from CNKI and international core journals(50 from master theses,50 from research articles written by experts),aiming to solve the following questions:(1)What are the distributional characteristics of metadiscourse in abstracts by novices and experts?(2)Are there any similarities or differences in the use of metadiscourse in the two academic levels? If any,what are they?(3)What possible factors influence the distributions of metadiscourse in abstracts written by novices and experts?This study firstly makes a complete manual annotation for ten subcategories of metadiscourse.Next,the occurrences of them are calculated with the help of retrieval software Antconc.Finally,the frequencies of each subtype are obtained through Loglikeihood and Chi-square Calculator.The results indicate that there are similarities and differences on metadiscourse in abstracts of academic discourse written by novices and experts.As a whole,both novices and experts make large use of metadiscourse in these abstracts,which demonstrates that metadiscourse plays an important role in academic writing.Interactive metadiscourse are more frequently used than interactional metadiscourse in the two corpora.Specifically speaking,among the kinds of interactive metadiscourse,transitional markers and frame markers occur more frequently than evide ntials and endophoric markers.Furthermore,more significant differences appear in the two corpora.Novices prefer to utilize transitional markers and code glosses,while experts give greater weight to code glosses and evidentials.However,the two corpora show no significant difference in the use of frame markers.In terms of interactional metadiscourse,hedges and boosters dominate in abstracts by the two communities.Engagement markers are employed more frequently in abstracts by novices,while hedges occur with higher frequency in abstracts by experts.Nevertheless,the two kinds of abstracts show no salient difference in the use of other types of interactional metadiscourse.For these similarities and distinctions,we hold that they may have to do wit h abstracts' features,conventions of academic writing,authors' knowledge level,etc.The study not only enriches the theories of metadiscourse,but also offers fresh insights into metadiscourse in abstracts of academic writing.In addition,this researc h is beneficial to improve abilities of teaching and writing in second language.