Stance-Taking through Metadiscourse in Doctoral Dissertations

Author : Cem CAN -- Fatma Yuvayapan
Number of pages : 128-142

Abstract

The authorial stance in academic genres is conveyed with the use of linguistic conventions of disciplines, one of which is metadiscourse. The aim of this study was to compare the use of interactional metadiscourse features (IMDMs) by native academic authors of English (NAAEs) and Turkish-speaking academic authors of English (TAAEs) for the construal of their stance in their doctoral dissertations. In a corpus of 120 doctoral dissertations, IMDMs were analyzed according to Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy by using Wordsmith Tools 6.0. Log likelihood statistics was conducted to see whether there was a statistically significant difference between these two groups in their use of IMDMs in terms of frequency and variety. A statistically significant underuse of IMDMs by Turkish-speaking academic authors of English regarding the overall use of 5 subcategories of IMDMs was found.

Keywords

Academic writing, Doctoral dissertations, Author stance, Interactional metadiscourse markers.

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