Metadiscourse markers in research article abstracts. An interlingual and interdisciplinary study

Abstract

Metadiscourse has been extensively studied in various genres, e.g. newspaper discourse, casual conversation, textbooks, advertisements, and research articles. Studies focusing on metadiscourse in research articles often omit analysing abstracts and traditionally investigate research articles only according to the IMRAD structure. This paper explores metadiscoursive elements in Czech and English research article abstracts in philosophy and medicine at two levels of analysis, interlingual and interdisciplinary. The aim is to investigate whether scienti fi c writers of research article abstracts identify more with their cultural identity or whether their identity is rather discipline-speci fi c. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is a taxonomy of metadiscourse markers proposed by Dafouz-Milne (2008) since it takes into account a functional differentiation of metadiscourse elements. The interlingual analysis reveals no major cultural distinctions, the interdisciplinary analysis proves that metadiscourse is more prevalent in humanities. Thus, we can conclude that academic writers of RA abstracts identify more with their disciplinary culture.