Research Article Introductions and Disciplinary Influences Based on Interactive Metadiscourse Markers

Metadiscourse refers to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement. This study draws on an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine disciplinary influences on the use of interactive metadiscourse in research article introductions. The study examined the distributions of interactive metadiscourse markers in a corpus of 120 RAs representing four academic disciplines. Physics and medicine were selected from hard discipline, applied linguistics and Economics were selected from soft science to shed some light on the ways academic writers deploy these resources to persuade readers in their own discourse community. No statistically significant difference was found in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers across disciplines. The findings suggest how academic writers use language to offer an accurate representation of their work in different fields, and how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. The findings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and for novice writers who would like to publish their research in academic journals.