A Contrastive study of metadiscourse devices in abstracts and conclusions in linguistics research articles

Resumo

This article is a quantitative and qualitative corpus-based study of how academic writers use the interactional metadiscourse devices in abstracts and conclusions in linguistics research articles. The main focus of the essay is to explore the shift from the least personal point of view to the most personalized strategies used by the author, to search the intrusion from the authors? part into their texts through the use of interactional metadiscourse devices and to explore to what extent they show a certain degree of responsibility in the text. A contrastive generic approach was used in a corpus of 18 journals in the Linguistics field based on Hyland?s (2005) metadiscourse taxonomy. The corpus was analyzed manually because all the occurrences had to be studied in context. In the results section some extracts from my data are included and commented on in order to validate the analysis provided. The study ends with comments on the significant findings illustrating how writers strategically use interactional metadiscourse devices to convey what they mean and highlighting the importance of metadiscourse resources for future research.