A Contrastive Study of Reflexive Metadiscourse Markers in Medicine articles

In spoken or written communication, metadiscourse markers help the listener or reader classify, interpret and react to the propositions presented in the message. The use of metadiscourse markers follows a convention. Therefore, the study of such devices is an essential aspect of academic context where the appropriate interaction of giver and receiver of knowledge is very important. In line with this perspective, the present study sought to examine the use of metadiscourse markers in research articles written by English speakers and Iranian researchers. In order to analyze the personal and impersonal metadiscourse markers, the current study made use of reflexive metadiscourse model proposed by Adel (2006). To do so, the discussion and conclusion section of research articles in the field of medicine were randomly selected and comprised the corpus of the study. In order to analyze the data, the frequency, patterns of use, and type of personal and impersonal metadiscourse markers were elicited through a manual corpus analysis. Moreover, to examine whether there is any significant difference in the use of personal and impersonal metadiscourse markers in the discussion and conclusion section of the research articles, a Chi square analysis was run. The results of the study revealed that there was no statistically significant difference across the two corpora.