چکیده:
Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the study of interactional metadiscourse markers in different contexts. However, not much research has been conducted about the discourse of journal author guidelines, especially the use of meta-discourse markers in this genre. Therefore, this corpus-based study had three main aims: 1) to delve deep into the types, frequencies and functions of stance and engagement markers based on Fu’s (2012) interactional metadiscourse taxonomy, 2) to compare the distribution of stance and engagement features in journal author guidelines and 3) to investigate whether there is a significant difference between macro/micro interactional metadiscourse markers in journal author guidelines. A corpus of 280 author guidelines produced by seven leading international academic publishers in eight academic sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences was compiled and analyzed. The results of the analysis showed that engagement features (reader-oriented) enjoyed higher frequency of use in journal author guidelines. Moreover, the difference between the frequency of stance and engagement features was statistically significant. Furthermore, differences reported between macro and micro interactional metadiscourse were statistically significant. The extensive use of macro interactional metadiscourse markers indicated a high degree of interactionality of journal author guidelines. The present study gives us considerable insight into the dialogic nature of a totally neglected academic genre.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The results of the analysis showed that engagement features (reader-oriented) enjoyed higher frequency of use in journal author guidelines.
Interaction Stance Engagment Hedges Boosters Attitudes Self-mentions Reader- inclusive pronouns Directives Questions Figure1.
Model of interactional metadiscourse (Fu, 2012) Figure 1 shows that stance features have four sub-categories: 1) hedges are linguistic like possible, might, perhaps which indicate the writer’s evaluation about different voices, and reduces his or her complete commitment to a proposition (Hyland, 2005a).
Gillaerts and Van de Velde (2010) conducted a study to examine the distribution of some stance features including hedges, boosters and attitude markers in abstract compared with their distribution in research articles to realize the extent to which research abstracts differ from research articles with regard to the use of interpersonal elements.
Based on the analysis of 240 research papers from eight disciplines, he found that self-mentions and reader-pronouns, particularly inclusive we, were more common in the humanities and social sciences while directives were the only interactive feature which occurred most frequently in the hard disciplines.
4. 1 Overall distribution of IMD markers in JAGs Table 3 displays the overall distribution of stance and engagement features in eight sub-disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, normalized to a text length of 1000 words.
The findings demonstrated that JAGs pay much more attention to engagement features (reader-inclusive pronouns, directives and questions) than stance features (hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions).