A comparative study of metadiscourse used in academic texts in the fields of science and social sciences

The term metadiscourse refers to the material which helps to organize the text, signal the writer?s attitude, intended message and assumptions thus shaping the overall organization of the text and providing a better understanding for the interlocutors. It is a rhetorical device writers use for conveying their ideas, determining the social distance of reader-writer relationship. Writers can create an involved style of writer persona or a more remote stance by using the appropriate metadiscourse devices.So, this useful concept, namely metadiscourse is used to analyse the texts and this study aims to compare academic texts in science and social sciences by using metadiscoursal taxonomies proposed by Hyland (1998). The metadiscourse elements in these articles will be examined in two categories as textual and interpersonal metadiscourse.Based on a textual and interpersonal analysis of 18 research articles, 9 science, 9 social science, this paper seeks to identify metadiscourse functions and their distribution and frequency used in those articles comparatively. The articles are randomly chosen from the recent issues of Oxford Journals in the fields of Medicine, Molecular Biology, Mathematics, Econometrics, History and Sociology. The results of the obtained data indicate that there are differences in the type and distribution of metadiscourse functions used in science and social science articles.Keywords: Academic metadiscourse, textual/ interpersonal metadiscourse, science social sciences, research articles