A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers. This study aimed to explore how interactive metadiscourse markers are deployed by research article abstract writers belonging to different disciplinary communities within the soft sciences, while trying to reach the audience by creating a well-organized discourse. Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to analyze 60 research article abstracts written in Applied Linguistics and Economics. Based on the results, there were marked variations found across the two disciplines in terms of interactive metadiscourse markers.

Research articles have often materialized through the use of impersonal objective strategies viz. abstract rhetors, passive constructions, and nominalizations. However, intrusive or subjective strategies, such as self-mentions, appear to integrate impersonal structures. As a rhetorical strategy to explicitly portray authorial selves, self-mentions help writers to project themselves into the discourse by marketing themselves and demarcating their original contribution to the field. Here, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted to examine explicit authorial presence in a comparable corpus of 40 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering, and chemistry by taking into consideration: (i) the frequency of using exclusive first person plural pronouns (

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The present review article examines a selection of recent academic discourse concerning metadiscourse. Metadiscourse relates to aspects of a text which organise the discourse in an explicit way, engage the addressee, and indicate the writer's attitude. It is integral to the contexts in which it happens and is intimately dealt with according to the norms and expectations of specific cultural and professional communities. This review aims to explore the effect of disciplinary conventions and norms as well as language context on the manifestation of metadiscourse markers in academic writing. Since most scholars commonly believe that the application of metadiscourse differs from discipline to discipline and language to language, the accuracy of this belief is investigated. Therefore, results of some earlier studies are reviewed so as to investigate the accuracy of the above assertion. Limitations of existing empirical studies are discussed and some directions for future research regarding the use of metadiscourse in academic settings are suggested as well.Khedri, Chan and Tan 132

The present paper focused on the status of thematic progression patterns in academic texts between English and Persian languages. To this end, following McCabe (1999) and North (2005), the first three pages of the first chapter of 8 books in terms of Linguistics (4 in English, as source texts and 4 in Persian, as translated texts) were selected and analyzed regarding thematic progression patterns. The obtained results showed that there were significant differences between the languages in focus concerning how information are introduced in texts especially in case of linear and constant patterns. The main concluding remark taken from this study is that not only authors but also translators should be vigilant of such cohesive devices as thematic progression in creating more cohesive text since, as Hatim and Mason (1990) mentions, we know little about what patterns there are and how equivalence could be achieved between different languages. This is an aspect of texture which should be of crucial importance to the translator (p. 220)