Metadiscourse in Academic vs. Non-Academic Writing: A Comparative Corpus-driven Inquiry

Abstract

The main purpose of the current research was to analyze interactive and interactional metadiscourse features usage and distribution in academic and non-academic texts. To this end, two different corpora of academic and non-academic texts were compiled by random sampling procedure and the Sketch Engine software was used for extracting and analyzing metadiscourse features in both corpora. As far as the theoretical framework of the study was concerned, the classification proposed by Hyland (2005), interactive and interactional dichotomy, was used. As the data from both corpora reveal, the interactive metadiscourse features were used more in comparison with interactional metadiscourse features. In addition, in academic writing, transitions were the most applicable interactive metadiscourse features while in non-academic writing while hedges were the most used ones. The results show that while the academic writing corpus was interactive oriented in nature, the non-academic corpus was more interactional supported in nature abstract should synthetically outline all the pertinent results, in a short but intelligible form.