Analysing the Metadiscourse Markers in the Conclusion Sections of Academic Research Articles: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Article writing plays a significant role in academic writing in all the major fields of education. According to Hyland (2004), analysing the text's metadiscourse can be valuable for examining academic writings and assessing multiple discourse communities' rhetorical characteristics and priorities. In academic writing, metadiscourse markers play a pivotal role in improving coherence and clarity. The current research aims to investigate the metadiscourse marker’s (MDM) frequency, percentage, differences, and implications in the academic research article’s conclusion. A mixed-methods approach has been used for the data analysis for the current study. Researchers have used Hyland's (2005) taxonomy model as a framework. Six selected meta-discourse markers— transitions, Endophoric markers, evidential, hedges, boosters, and attitude markers—have been selected to accomplish this analysis. The corpus of 11027 words has been collected from 60 research articles (15 from each) belonging to four disciplines: chemistry, biology, sociology, and sociolinguistics. MetaPak software is used as a tool for analysis to extract the above-mentioned selected markers. Further, manual analysis was done to see whether the software's results were authentic. The findings revealed that interactional metadiscourse markers were more frequent than interactive meta-discourse markers in conclusion sections of both social and natural sciences. Furthermore, hedges are the most frequent among the interactional discourse markers in the conclusion section. This study reveals that the frequent use of hedges indicates that the writers are not confident in their findings and opinions.