Gender in Persian Research Articles: A Corpus-based Approach to Interactional Metadiscourse Markers Based on Hyland’s Model

Metadiscourse is a term for the metalinguistic tools used to establish interaction in discourse. Hyland categorizes metadiscourse in two major classes. One of them is interactional metadiscourse which focuses on the participants in communication, the speaker or author’s identity as well as the norms of the cooperative society. Interactional metadiscourse is comprised of five markers. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether there are any significant differences in terms of gender in the general use of the markers in interactional metadiscourse as well as in the distribution of various interactional metadiscourse markers across Persian research articles. To achieve this goal, thirty Persian single-author research articles were investigated. Half of the articles’ authors were female and the other half were male. The interactional markers and their frequencies in the corpus were closely evaluated considering the situational context. The data were analyzed using SPSS. The findings indicate that, regarding the gender variable, there is an overall significant difference in the frequencies of the interactional metadiscourse markers. Further, the separate review of these markers in relation to gender shows that there are significant differences in the use of hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions and there is no significant difference in the use of boosters and engagement markers between male and female writers. In short, the results of the present study confirm a gender-based approach in the distribution of linguistic forms.