The investigation of metadiscourse markers in research article abstracts

The main purpose of the article abstracts is to persuade the readers to read the article, and the writers use some strategies to achieve this aim in their abstracts. These strategies, without any additions to propositional content of the text, should guide readers, show parts of the text, provide cohesion within the text, elaborate the information through textual resources; reflect the writers perspective towards readers and propositional content, encode themselves explicitly in the text, include readers as a discourse participant or focus their attention through interpersonal resources. The aim of this study is to investigate the metadiscourse markers in research article abstracts in life and social sciences. The database of the study comprises of the abstracts of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics in life sciences and the abstracts of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, history in social sciences. In this study totally 289 article abstracts from the above-mentioned fields were investigated. The data obtained in this study were investigated according to Hyland (2005)'s metadiscourse model. According to the data obtained in the study, article abstracts in social sciences have more frequently and various markers than abstracts in life sciences, abstracts in life sciences have interactive metadiscourse markers more than articles in social sciences, writers in social sciences use interactional metadiscourse markers in their abstracts more than writers in life sciences, there are some metadiscursive conventions in abstracts of life and socials sciences, apart from conventions some interdisciplinary differences were determined. Keywords: Metadiscourse, Research article abstract, Life sciences, Social sciences, Interaction.