Exploring Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse Markers inDiscussion Sections of Social and Medical Science Articles

Metadiscourse markers are used as one of the tools which make writing more effective in social environment and areregarded as one of the most important features in communication among people for expressing the information throughdifferent linguistic expressions with cohesive and logical constructions. Accordingly, the present study aimed toidentify interactive and interactional metadiscourse in a targeted sample of 100 English research articles written byIranian writers utilizing Hyland’s taxonomy. The sample included the discussion sections of randomly selected articleswith 70000 running words published between 2010 and 2016. The overall findings disclosed that, in interactivemetadiscourse category, the use of transitions, frame markers, and evidentials in social science articles were morefrequent than those in medical science texts. The results further revealed that the use of endophoric markers and codeglosses were almost the same. In interactional metadiscourse corpora, however, the findings demonstrated that writersused hedges, boosters, and self-mentions more frequently in medical science articles compared to those in socialsciences. Comparatively, the discussion sections in social science texts contained a higher percentage of engagementmarkers. It was also found out that there was no significant difference in the use of attitude markers in both disciplines.Notably, the social science authors seemingly preferred to employ interactive metadiscourse markers more, while themedical science authors used interactional metadiscourse markers more frequently in their research articles.

کلیدواژه ها:

interactional metadiscourse marker ، interactive metadiscourse marker ، medical science ، metadiscoursemarker ، social science