Abstract

Based on Hyland's interpersonal model, this study aims to examine the changing patterns of metadiscourse in 240 research papers (RAs) across the soft disciplines (i.e., education and history) and the hard disciplines (i.e., mechanical engineering and physics) over the past 60 years. It was found that the use of metadiscourse resources overall has shown a trend of decline, but with a substantial increase in interactive features and a more considerable decrease in interactional resources over years. The finding shows that writers overall have a tendency of using more interactive resources but less interactional features to seek more explicit and convincing texts, and a more objective and scientific approach. It indicates the soft disciplines are inclined to adopt methodologies in the hard disciplines and their disciplinary variations are becoming obscure. This study extends the diachronic study of metadiscourse, provides important implications for academic writing, and verifies the finding in Hyland & Jiang [1].

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