The rhetorical device of metadiscourse has been perceived to be crucial in understanding the dynamic nature of the academic text. Studies on this rhetorical strategy in Arabic academic texts or in those written by Arabic-speaking writers are limited. This study fills this gap by examining 44 paired abstracts (Arabic and English) published in English research articles by Arab scholars. Using Hyland's (2005) model, the findings indicate the overuse of interactive markers compared to the interactional ones in both sets of abstracts. Within the interactive category, Arabic abstracts relied on transition markers while their English counterparts relied on frame markers and code-glosses. Regarding the interactional category, the English texts employed them more with exception to self-mentions as they were given similar attention in both language groups.The possible influence of the academic discipline on the distribution of metadiscourse resources has also attracted the researchers' attention. Hyland and Tse (2004) examined L2 postgraduate dissertations and found that texts in humanities and social science disciplines employed more metadiscourse markers than those in natural science. They

The idea of whether repetition has any relation with the writing quality of the text has remained an issue that intrigues a number of scholars in linguistics and in writing studies. Michael Hoey (1991), Halliday and Hasan (1976) are two prominent works in presenting detailed and thoughtful analysis of repetition occurrences in the text. This study uses a model of lexical cohesion proposed by Witte and Faigley (1981) which itself is based on the taxonomies of cohesive ties presented by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The model deals with lexical cohesion and its subclasses, namely, repetition (same type, synonym, near-synonym, super-ordinate item, and general item) and collocation. The corpus includes five argumentative essays written by students in the field of English language literature. Five teaching assistants were asked to rank the papers on a five-point scale based on their perception of the papers' writing quality. The results showed that the paper that received the lowest rating in terms of the writing quality was the one that included the largest number of repetition occurrences of the same type. The study concludes by arguing that repetition may not be considered as monolithic, and suggests that every type of repetition needs to be examined individually in order to determine what enhances and what deteriorates the writing quality.

Metadiscourse, as an important analytic tool, was rarely used to explore the generic structure of Ph.D. dissertation acknowledgments, and within this genre, the role of gender has been unexplored. This study employs interactional resources within the metadiscourse framework (Hyland, 2005) to investigate gender differences in 120 dissertation acknowledgments written by male and female Saudi students at U.S. universities. The results revealed a number of similarities and differences. Both genders employed thanking God, a move that was not detected in English texts analysed by Hyland (2004). The results also showed the absence of hedging devices and engagement markers from all texts. Writers, however, distributed the boosting and attitude markers differently as female writers applied boosters more when acknowledging moral support while male writers used boosters more when thanking for academic assistance, while the opposite occurred with attitude markers. The employment of self-mentions revealed a clearer gender difference as females applied them more with different forms than males did. Overall, the analysis of dissertation acknowledgments using metadiscourse framework showed that metadiscourse boundaries are flexible as they can be adjusted to fulfill the nature of the genre it applies to. Thus, the study recommends that more research should be conducted to investigate different academic genres and part-genres to develop our understanding of the application of metadiscourse. It closes with some pedagogical implications.

This study has investigated the thematic structure of RA abstracts published in business administration, applied linguistics, accounting, physics, chemistry, and computer science disciplines from the perspectives of topical, textual, and interpersonal themes. The results showed that the unmarked topical themes were the most prevalent types in the RA abstracts, while the interpersonal themes were the least frequent. Concerning the textual themes, the results revealed some disciplinary variations. For example, the computer science abstracts relied heavily on conjunctive adjuncts while applied linguistics abstracts made a sort of balance between the conjunctions and conjunctive adjuncts. Additionally, the results showed that the adversative type was the most commonly used in all disciplines except in computer science where the temporal type was the most frequent element, and the accounting abstracts have had both adversative and additive types with the same frequency.

Taking an effective authorial stance has been the interest of researchers on academic writing for quite some time. It is agreed upon that the interpersonal aspect of writing is essential in setting up prosody and forcing persuasive argument expected in academic context. This paper is based on a hypothesis that effective and authorial stance is a major principal requirement for publishing in top-ranked journals. Hence, it investigates the linguistic resources employed by authors to realize authorial voices when introducing their research topics and how they relate them with the potential meanings of rhetorical moves to build up persuasive argument. To do this, the study drew on Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal system and Swales' (1990) genre analysis as the two main analytical frameworks for data analysis. The data consisted of sixty research articles (RAs) taken from journals in the linguistics field. Half of the RAs were drawn from SSCI-ranked journals while the other half from other journals that do not have prestigious indexes. The results showed that the percentage of using Monoglossic resources (propositions that contain bare assertions where writer/speaker makes no reference to any alternative viewpoints) is higher in frequency in non-SSCI journals compared to SSCI-ranked journals. Overall, the introduction sections of the two groups of journals have shown a link between the use of evaluative language patterns and the potential meanings of rhetorical moves, which altogether may help project effective authorial stance.