Sub-disciplinary variation of metadiscursive verb patterns in English research articles: a functional analysis of medical discourse

Abstract As a cover term for the negotiation of propositional information and reader engagement, metadiscourse has gained considerable attention from scholars of academic discourse. Recent studies have extended to previously unexplored structures that realize metadiscourse, such as ‘metadiscursive nouns’ (Jiang and Hyland 2018. Nouns and academic interactions: A neglected feature of metadiscourse. Applied Linguistics 39. 508–531). Among various linguistic resources, verbs are often regarded as a linguistic element undertaking multiple discourse acts and functions in different contexts, with some acts and functions being metadiscursive. Based on previous studies on reporting verbs and functional sentence stems, this study proposes the concept of metadiscursive verb patterns (MVPs) and examines this linguistic resource in a self-built MedDEAP corpus of five million words, a clinical medicine English research article corpus consisting of 18 sub-disciplines. We conducted an intradisciplinary investigation into MVPs to analyze their structural and functional variations across the sub-disciplines of medical academic English. The findings revealed that most MVPs exhibit a preference for some sub-disciplines, and a few sub-disciplines reflect certain characteristic genre features in the use of certain MVPs. It is shown that medical academic discourse is characterized by methodological and conceptual cross-fertilization. Hence, variation in MVPs is a natural linguistic representation of interdisciplinary synergy. Based on our findings, we conclude by addressing the pedagogical implications for proper use of MVPs in academic writing.