Interactive metadiscourse markers in Turkish research article abstracts: a diachronic analysis

Abstract

Metadiscourse is an important linguistic resource which establishes the writer-reader relationship and makes a text reader-friendly. There is a scarcity of research which has analyzed the metadiscourse markers in a diachronic way. This study aims to explore the interactive markers such as transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, code glosses employed in Turkish research article abstracts published in Journal of Linguistics and Literature, Journal of Linguistics Research, Language Journal in 2008-2009 and 2017-2018 years and takes Hyland's (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse as the theoretical framework. The findings of this study illustrate that 2017-2018 writers guide the readers in their research article abstracts much more than 2008-2009 writers with the use of evidentials by which they refer to the other researchers' ideas. This result reveals the diachronic evolution in the degree of writer-reader relationship from the perspective of social relations so that 2017-2018 writers are more inclined to declare being member of a specific discourse community with the use of evidentials. This research is expected to contribute to the understanding of Turkish academic discourse from a diachronic perspective and to provide useful implications in the fields such as foreign language teaching, corpus linguistics and text analysis.