The metadiscoursive nouns in Turkish academic texts

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the linguistic mechanisms writers employ to convey their personal feelings and evaluations; linguistic resources such as evaluation, stance, and metadiscourse have garnered significant attention. Metadiscourse, in particular, is perceived as a means of understanding rhetorical structures in academic writing and uncovering the dynamic interactions underlying persuasive claims. Although metadiscourse may seem like an easily acceptable and understandable term in this context; determining its boundaries is actually quite challenging. Given that authors make choices from a specific range of options while aiming to persuade the reader in their text creation, it can be argued that word choices, and thus types of words, also play a role in persuasion. In this context, nouns that assist authors in structuring the discourse by employing head nouns, while simultaneously directing the reader's thoughts about the discourse, are considered Metadiscourse Nouns. Accordingly, metadiscursive nouns, which manifest the author's stance in academic texts, were adopted for this study. The aim of this study is to reveal how authors use nouns in their texts to persuade and communicate with their readers, and to determine the functions of these nouns. For his purpose, 322 research articles published between 2015 and 2019 were examined. The research articles constituting the database were analyzed according to the functions of metadiscursive nouns developed by Jiang and Hyland (2016). Metadiscursive nouns in the research articles were identified, and their functions were determined. The study concluded that the author's choice of head nouns is an effective strategy for representing author stance; metadiscursive nouns serve as a means for authors to defend their claims and persuade the reader; and author stance is not only a lexical feature of the discourse but also a grammatical phenomenon.