A Study Of Metadiscourse In Abstracts Of Research Articles In International Linguistic Journals

Metadiscourse is an important linguistic strategy frequently utilized by researchers to guide readers to understand the organization,to convey the writers' attitudes,and to build interactions between readers and writers.A large number of researchers have investigated metadiscourse from different perspectives since it was put forward by Harris in 1959.However,few researchers has paid attention to analyze the employment of metadiscourse in international English research article abstracts.Therefore,it is of critical importance to examine metadiscourse in research article abstracts.The present study takes Hyland's(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse as the framework.There are two categories of metadiscourse in this model,interactive and interactional metadiscourse.The former consists of five subcategories,which are transitions,frame markers,code glosses,evidentials,and endophoric markers;the latter also includes five subcategories,which are hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self mentions and engagement markers.It aims to investigate the distributions and different realizations of metadiscourse,and to explore the reasons of variations in metadiscourse realizations in research article abstracts.With the purpose of having highly representative data,the author collected four distinguished and highly cited journals in linguistics published from 2015 to 2016.Each journal consists of 30 research article abstracts,which leads to the formation of this corpus with 20,371 words in total.And both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to analyze the realizations of metadiscourse resources with the help of Ant Conc 3.2.4 w(Windows)2011.The findings show that metadiscourse is relatively widely employed in research article abstracts,with 1,525 instances in total(74.87 occurrences per thousand words).In addition,it is found that interactional metadiscourse with 800 instances is slightly higher than interactive metadiscourse with 725 instances in the corpus.And in terms of the frequency among subcategories,transitions,boosters,hedges and code glosses are among the top ranked metadiscourse resources.With regard to the distribution ofvarious forms of each subcategory,it is also found that there is a great use of additive and contrastive transitions which might be due to the way English writers construct their arguments.And the presence of frame markers which are employed to make readers familiar with research article writers' logic,is relatively high in the corpus.In the end,possible explanations provided by this study for variations are the summarizing and persuasive functions of different linguistic forms of metadiscourse resources,the writer's intention to demonstrate a fact or to build interations with readers,and the disciplines of certain research community such as the short length nature for research article abstracts.This study sheds light on realizing the importance of metadiscourse in organizing texts,emphasizing writers' attitudes towards certain subject,and facilitating the interaction between writers and readers.It also provides pedagogical implications to help second language writers to get familiar with the disciplines of research community so that their writings can be published.