A Corpus-based Study of Interdisciplinary Variation of Metadiscourse in Pakistani Research Papers of Soft Sciences

Abstract

Metadiscourse is a recent enterprise of applied linguists through which the text-internalnature of discourse is explored with reference to persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the writers with their own discourses and the readers too (Hyland, 2005). Metadiscourse, with respect to genre, register, and cultural situatedness,has been the major foci of inquiries till now. However, patterns of interaction situatedamong differentdiscourse communities of academics through metadiscourse need more attention in general and, in Pakistani context, in particular. Therefore, the current study intends to investigate interactiveand interactional metadiscourse in Pakistani research discourses of English, Education, and History. For this purpose, we collected 52 research articles comprising corpus of 231529words published in research journals recognized by Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. We applied Hyland’s framework of metadiscoursefor mapping expressions as metadiscursive. For identification of 300 metadiscursive markers proposed by Hyland, a recent corpus tool named MetaPak (Abbas et al. 201b) was used successfully. The study revealed noticeable variation in occurrenceand prototypicalityof metadiscourse employment in Pakistani research discourses while comparing with other international studies. This variation, consequently, may be considered one of the important factors causing dialogic closurein order to achieve persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the international gate keepers, reviewers, and readers.