A Contrastive Study On Interactional Metadiscourse Of Chinese And English Applied Linguistics Research Articles

In the writing process of academic discourse,metadiscourse can help writers express their stance reasonably and appropriately.The study of interactional metadiscourse is one of the hot topics in academic discourse research in recent years.Interactional metadiscourse,as a category of metadiscourse,helps to achieve interaction between writers and readers,and also helps readers better understand academic discourse.The model of interactional metadiscourse proposed by Hyland(2005b)is the most authoritative and widely used theoretical analysis model in the field of academic writing.However,previous studies on the use of interactional meta discourse in Chinese and English applied linguistics are less.In addition,they primarily concentrate on a section of research articles,comparative research on complete discourse between Chinese and English is even rarer.Therefore,it is necessary to study the use and distribution of interactional metadiscourse in research articles of Chinese and English applied linguistics.However,previous research has primarily focused on the contrast of academic discourse in a single language,with few studies on the contrast of multiple languages.Furthermore,they primarily concentrate on a section of research articles,and there is a scarcity of comparative studies of entire discourses.There are even fewer comparative studies on the use of interactional metadiscourse in Chinese and English applied linguistics research articles,so the thesis investigates the use and the distribution of interactional metadiscourse in Chinese and English applied linguistics research articles.Given this,this thesis conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis of thirty research articles published between 2017 and 2021 in six leading Chinese and English journals of applied linguistics,using Hyland’s(2005)model and the stratified random sampling principle.Through the retrieval tool Ant Conc,the frequency of the use of interactional metadiscourse are counted,and the characteristics are revealed respectively.The thesis summerizes and discusses their similarities and differences,and a discussion of factors that may have influenced these similarities and differences.The analysis reveals that :(1)Various types of interactional metadiscourse are widely used by both Chinese and English corpora.Among them,stance markers appear more frequently than engagement markers It indicates that engagement markers always show the most obvious intention of involvement,which may contradict the authority required in formal discourses;(2)In the category of stance markers,boosters and hedges are the most used,which shows that both English and Chinese corpora tend to use these two types of markers to reduce or enhance the commitment or responsibility to a proposition;(3)Among the categories of engagement markers,directives are the most frequently used,which shows that both English and Chinese corpora contain clear explanations and appropriate reader interaction.In addition,there are also some differences in the two corpora:(1)English corpus use more interactional metadiscourse,and the use of interactional metadiscourse is generally more in English corpus than in Chinese corpus,both in the density and the proportion of each item in the total interactional metadiscourse;(2)In the category of stance markers,boosters and attitude markers appear more frequently in English than in Chinese;(3)In the Chinese corpus,the frequency of self-mentions is relatively low.Compared with English RA authors,Chinese authors tend to avoid the first person pronoun,singular “I”.The main reasons for the similarities are as follows: the core features of academic discourse determine the similarities between Chinese and English.And for the differences,there are three reasons:(1)The influence of language features on research articles.English and Chinese belong to two different language systems,English emphasizes morphology and Chinese emphasizes meaning,i.e.English pays more attention to the use of interactional metadiscourse to express the author’s point of view and build the relationship between the author and the reader.(2)The influence of cultural factors on research articles.English and Chinese belong to different cultural systems,so they are also influenced by different cultural thinking.English tends to be concise and clear,while Chinese is euphemistic and subtle.In addition,English culture emphasizes individuality and encourages the expression of opinions,attitudes and evaluations,while Chinese culture places more emphasis on collectivism and collective behavior.Chinese authors of research articles usually from the text and discourage them from expressing their individual opinions and attitudes,as shown in this thesis,the interactional metadiscourse in English research articles is nearly twice as large as that in Chinese research articles.(3)The influence of academic writing norms on research articles.Most Chinese journals have specific editorials policies.Some publication specify word count and “self-mentions”.Thus,there is a lack of self-mentions in Chinese research articles.This thesis,on the one hand,explores interactional metadiscourse in academic discourse,which broadens and supplements the scope and field of research on interactional metadiscourse in academic discourse;on the other hand,this thesis proves the applicability of the model of interactional metadiscourse for analyzing academic discourse;in addition,this thesis also has implications for academic writing and teaching.