Abstract:
This study investigates how L1 Chinese scholars in hard science disciplines use metadiscourse in their English academic writing, by comparing the deployment of metadiscoursal resources written by L1 Chinese and L1 English scholars. Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis. We found that L1 Chinese scholars used less metadiscoursal resources than L1 English scholars on the whole. In the two dimensions of interaction, L1 Chinese scholars made more use of interactive devices, while L1 English scholars used more interactional items. This reflects that L1 Chinese scholars made greater efforts to guide the readers through their papers, and L1 English scholars are more concerned with creating author identity and engaging their readers. The t-tests confirmed that L1 Chinese scholars used significantly more code glosses in interactive metadiscourse and less self-mentions in interactional metadiscourse. An in-depth analysis reveals two functions of code glosses and five functions of self-mentions in RA abstracts
Machine summary:
Studies reveal that the scholars in humanities and social sciences (the soft disciplines)1 interact more with the readers than their counterparts in natural sciences and engineering (the hard sciences) as they employ more metadiscoursal resources on the whole (Hyland, 2010; Hyland {View the image of this page} Tse, 2004).
They make greater efforts to involve the reader in the text by using more hedges (Hyland, 2010), attitude markers (Hyland, 2010; Lafuente-Millán, 2012), self- mentions (Hyland, 2010), and stance nouns (Jiang {View the image of this page} Hyland, 2015), which show that scholars in the soft disciplines favor more explicit personal interpretation than their counterparts in hard sciences.
their line of argumentation with transitions, endophorics, evidentials (Bloch {View the image of this page} Chi, 1995; Kim {View the image of this page} Lim, 2013; Lee {View the image of this page} Casal, 2014; Ruan {View the image of this page} Xu, 2016), evaluative strategies (Giannoni, 2005; Lafuente-Millán, 2012; Loi, Lim {View the image of this page} Wharton, 2016; Mur-Dueñas, 2010), cause-effect metadiscourse signals (Moreno, 1997), premise-conclusion relationships (Moreno, 2004), and hedges (Hu {View the image of this page} Cao, 2011; Ruan {View the image of this page} Xu, 2016) than academic writing in languages such as Spanish, Italian, Chinese or Finnish.
The first corpus comprised three sub- corpora of 60 English RA abstracts from biology (Bio), chemistry (Chem) and physics (Phy), published in prestigious academic journals in China, written by L1 Chinese scholars.