A Cross-Linguistic Study of Interactional Metadiscourse in English and Chinese Research Articles by the Same Chinese Scholars

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how Chinese scholars in Applied Linguistics construct different authorial stances in their English and Chinese research articles (RAs) by using interactional metadiscourse comprising boosters, hedges, and self-mentions. A specially designed corpus of 22 Chinese and 22 English RAs written by the same group of Chinese scholars was compiled and examined for metadiscourse forms and functions. We found that (a) while the Chinese scholars employed similar frequencies of boosters in both their Chinese and English RAs, they used significantly more hedges in their English RAs than in their Chinese RAs; (b) while they used more boosters than hedges in their Chinese RAs, a reverse pattern was found in their English RAs; (c) they used significantly more self-mentions, particularly first-person pronouns in their English RAs, than in their Chinese RAs. These findings indicate that the same Chinese scholars have displayed different epistemic stances and authorial identities in their Chinese-medium and English-medium publications.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorial identity
• Chinese scholar in applied linguistics
• English for academic purposes
• interactional metadiscourse
• research article
• stance

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their constructive suggestions and sincere help. This paper is supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC NO. 202007960005).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We acknowledge that the co-authors’ contribution may affect stance-taking in the research papers. However, because (1) there are practical constraints of finding single-authored papers which meet our criteria; and (2) there is no way of ascertaining the contribution between the co-authors, we assume that the leading authors are primarily responsible for drafting and revising of the paper. We acknowledge that this is a limitation and the results should be interpreted with this caveat in mind.

2. In this study another type of interactional metadiscourse, attitude markers, was excluded from further analysis because the occurrence of attitude markers was not salient enough in our corpus (Although we only found four attitude markers in CE and two attitude markers in CC, it is likely that there are more implicit expressions of attitude in our corpus data).

3. We generated a list of Chinese stance markers based on previous research (e.g., Hu & Cao, 2011; Mu et al., 2015). Then we piloted the list on our corpus and used the finalized list for coding the Chinese data. We acknowledge that there may be markers which exist in the Chinese articles but not in the English ones, but in the present study we did not find any.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heng Gong

Heng Gong is a first-year doctoral student at the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He graduated with an M.A. in English Studies from the University of Helsinki in 2019. His research interests include English for academic purposes, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities.

Lingling Liu

Lingling Liu is an associate professor in China Three Gorges University and a master supervisor for postgraduates majoring in both Applied Linguistics and English language teaching. Her research interests include second language writing, English for academic purposes, and English language teaching.

Feng Cao

Feng Cao (Ph.D.) is a lecturer at the Centre for English Language and Communication, National University of Singapore. His research interests include second language writing, English for academic/specific purposes, discourse analysis, and corpus-based language studies.