Interactional metadiscourse in expert and student disciplinary writing: Exploring intrageneric and functional variation

Recent critical inquiries in metadiscourse research call into question the functional inadequacy of a word-based lexical approach. To account more fully the functional affordances of metadiscoursal features in academic writing, this paper examines the Interactional Metadiscourse, namely hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions based on a 2.64-million-word corpus of L1-English expert and L1-Chinese student writing in Agricultural Science. Through an intra-generic lens, we found a significant effect of part-genre on the use of all four target categories for both writer groups; and L1-English experts employed significantly more hedges than L2 students while L2 students used significantly more boosters and attitude markers. Functionally, both groups shared a largely similar deployment of functional subtypes across part-genres with L1-English experts outperforming L2 students only in one function: ‘stating a goal or purpose’ in self-mentions. Subsequent qualitative discourse-functional analyses at part-genre level between two writer groups explained some student-produced discipline-inappropriate metadiscoursal choices. This paper concludes with resources for a rigorous coding development, and implications for teaching metadiscourse to disciplinary writers with an emphasis on using available discipline-specific corpora to understand how functional taxonomizations of IM interface with socio-rhetorical contexts in disciplinary writing.