Interpersonal metadiscourse: an indicator of interaction and identity

Abstract

By using genre analysis, this study investigates the way writers use interpersonal metadiscourse to partly reveal their identity and examines their selected mode of interaction in two major academic fields: the social sciences (SS) and natural sciences (NS). A total of 55 academic research articles from the SS and NS were selected as the corpus of this study. A comparison of the two disciplines was made, based on the use of interpersonal metadiscourse through `hedges', `emphatics' and `attitude markers'. The analysis showed that the SS writers employed interpersonal metadiscourse more frequently than the NS writers. One-to-one comparison further showed that they varied significantly in their use of hedges and attitude markers but there was little difference in their use of emphatics. However, the use of hedges and emphatics was significantly different within each discipline. A qualitative in-depth analysis revealed that the choice of validity markers was closely related to the type of article being studied.