Metadiscourse in linguistics research articles : a contrastive study of English and Arabic texts

Abstract EN

The present paper analyzes met discourse expressions to understand the cultural differences between English and Arabic-speaking researchers.

It uses a contrastive corpus of seventy discussion sections of linguistics research articles written by native speakers of English and Arabic.

Within met discourse there appears to be two types: interactive and interactional.

Interactive met discourse strategies include : transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentially and code glosses.

Interactional strategies include : hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers and self-mentions.

Chi-square tests are carried out to clarify the probable differences between both groups.

Compared with English, Arabic draws on more interactive met discourse markers, which shows that Arabic puts a premium on textually at the expense of reader involvement, hence, being comparatively less reader responsible.

It comes out clearly that both interactive and interactional met discourse markers in Arabic are more frequent than in English.

It is concluded that this numerical preponderance is only formally significant to compensate for the weakness of research content and methodology.