RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS AND RECIPIENTORIENTED INTERACTIONAL METADISCOURSE MARKERS

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the recipient-oriented interactional metadiscourse markers in the RAAs (research article abstracts) of hard sciences and soft sciences in Turkish. For this purpose, a database consisting of 289 RAAs published between 2013-2017 in refereed journals in Dergipark and a total of 36152 words was built. The RAAs in the database of this research were analyzed based on the interactional categories of the metadiscourse classification developed by Hyland and Tse (2004) and by Hyland (2005) and compared both between and within fields. According to the data obtained in the research, it was determined that the most frequently interactional metadiscourse category in the RAAs of hard sciences and soft sciences is the boosters. In addition, it was found that the least encountered interactional metadiscourse markers were engagement and self-mention markers, RAAs of soft sciences contain more metadiscourse markers than those in hard sciences and there are variations in the tendency and frequency of metadiscourse usage within the subfields of both soft sciences and hard sciences. According to the findings of the research, it was determined that the disciplines (hard sciences, soft sciences and subdisciplines of these main disciplines) have similar functions within the framework of the most frequently and least frequently markers to direct their readers. However, they have different linguistic mechanisms in other categories of metadiscourse and use these mechanisms at different frequencies from each other.