Writer-Reader Interaction in Written Discourse: A Comparative Corpus-Based Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in English and Persian Academic Genre

Abstract

Metadiscourse features are the elements which constitute the writer-reader and/or speaker-audience interaction in communication. For this reason, this study set out to unearth the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as investigating writer-reader interaction in academic written genre in English and Persian languages. For this aim, 82 texts of English and 91 texts of Persian languages were gathered to create a do it yourself (DIY), balanced and representative corpus of 1,223,750 tokens. For detacting and categorizing metadiscourse features, Hyland’s model whose model is divided into interactive and interactional features was used. For extracting the metadiscourse features through concordance lines, Sketch engine corpus software was used. As the statistics and concordance lines of the corpus showed, the English corpus contained more interactive and interactional metadiscourse features than that of the Persian corpus. In addition, in both corpora, there was a propensity towards interactive metadiscourse features. Added to this, due to the numerical differences and heterogeneous distributional pattern of metadiscourse features, it was found out that the way interaction between writer and reader was constructed differed in English and Persian languages. The results of this paper are hoped to have useful and practical implications for researchers in such fields as, writing analysis, genre analysis, corpus linguistics, and contrastive analysis.