A diachronic and gender-based analysis of Turkish MA theses: The use of metadiscourse markers

Metadiscourse has been particularly valuable in written discourse as they help organizing and producing persuasive texts with textual and interpersonal functions. This study aims to reveal how the authors of Turkish master's theses construct metadiscourse in the conclusion sections and how these rhetorical devices are manifested from gender-based and diachronic perspectives. To this end, the corpus of this study is comprised of a total of 80 conclusion sections of Turkish master's theses in social science and humanities published in 2004 and 2019. Hyland's (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse was used as the analytical framework. Frequency analysis and Log-likelihood analysis were carried out to disclose the metadiscourse use in the corpus. Results revealed that metadiscourse categories have similar distributional patterns both across gender and across years of publication. Specifically, the authors employed more transitions, frame markers, code-glosses and less metadiscoursal evidentials and endophoric markers to guide the readers through the text. In regard to the use of interactional categories, both female and male authors used more boosters, hedges, attitude markers to interact with their readers and less engagement markers and self-mentions. In addition, interactional devices accounted for a greater proportion of metadiscourse resources in master's theses' conclusions and also in corpora of both genders and years of publication. Comparative analysis revealed that there is no statistically significant difference between the corpus of female and male authors in regard to the overall use of metadiscourse markers. All these similarities can be ascribed to the evaluative, interpretative, interpersonal and subjective nature of social science and humanities and the master's theses conclusions as an educational genre in which the authors need metadiscourse to persuade their readers about the results of their studies. On the other hand, the use of metadiscourse markers increased significantly in 2019, and also both in corpus of female and male authors. This difference may prove to be the evolutionary nature of academic genre and increasing awareness of discourse communities regarding the essential use of metadiscourse markers in master's theses conclusions for more persuasive, more reader-friendly and more coherent texts.