Reflexive metadiscourse in research articles in Spanish: Variation across three disciplines (Linguistics, Economics and Medicine)

Abstract

This corpus-driven study focuses on reflexive metadiscourse, taking the non-integrative approach to the study of this phenomenon (Mauranen, 1993a; Ädel, 2006; Toumi, 2009). The aim of this research project was to compare the deployment of reflexive metadiscourse in research articles from three disciplines (Medicine, Economics and Linguistics) written in Spanish, by looking at the occurrence of certain lexico-grammatical features that signal it. In this mixed-methods study, which combines quantitative and qualitative results, the findings were derived from a close manual analysis of 238 recent empirical RAs from Spanish-medium journals indexed in Web of Science (the MEL-2011 corpus). The results indicate that scientific writers from Economics and Medicine employ significantly fewer metadiscourse markers than their counterparts in Linguistics. There are also statistically significant differences between the three corpora in terms of several functional categories: self-mentions, relational markers, directives, discourse verbs, and code glosses. This suggests that this scientific genre varies greatly in terms of the manner and the extent to which scholarly writers from different disciplines are expected to signal their authorial presence, interact with their audience and guide the reader.