Interactive metadiscourse in research articles: A comparative study of paradigmatic and disciplinary influences

By Fenglong Cao, Guangwei Hu. 2014

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This article reports a comparative study of interactive metadiscourse in quantitative and qualitative research articles across the disciplines of applied linguistics, education, and psychology. Drawing on Hyland's metadiscourse framework, the study examined the use of five types of interactive metadiscourse, together with their subtypes, in a corpus of 120 research articles. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed clear cross-paradigmatic differences in the incidence of reformulators, comparative and inferential transitions, sequencers, and non-linear references. The analyses also identified marked cross-disciplinary differences in the use of exemplifiers, comparative transitions, linear references, and integral citations. These observed differences are interpretable in terms of the contrasting epistemologies underlying the qualitative and quantitative research paradigms and the different knowledge-knower structures prevailing in the disciplines under investigation.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e4bbd07eb6e0b25380eaba364e0e0af7f70a55e

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Literature and Literary Theory

Citations in the corpus

“In this paper we suggest”: Changing patterns of disciplinary metadiscourse (2018, background): “…date back to the early 1990s and have tended to focus on comparing texts in one language (almost always English) with those in another (e.g. Hu and Cao, 2011; Mur-Duenas, 2011) or Non-native English speakers writing academic texts in English (e.g. Hong and Cao, 2014; Li & Wharton, 2012).”