Abstract
Interactional metadiscourse markers are important linguistic resources for writers to communicate their stances and interact with their audiences, making them a significant topic of interest for academic writing researchers and teachers. This study examines sub-disciplinary, paradigmatic, and diachronic variations in the use of interactional metadiscourse among applied linguistics research articles. For this analysis, a corpus of 108 empirical research articles was collected from two sub-disciplines (second language acquisition and pragmatics), spanning three research paradigms (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) and comprising 36 articles per decade from 1990 to 2019. Using a computational text analysis approach for genre-specific language, quantitative analysis was first applied to interactional metadiscourse markers, followed by qualitative analysis. Results from a series of parametric and non-parametric tests, as well as textual analysis, indicate that the factors of sub-discipline, research paradigm, and decade influence the use of interactional metadiscourse and its subcategories to different degrees.
The findings indicate that sub-discipline and research paradigm do not have a significant effect on the overall use of stance and engagement markers. However, they significantly affect the use of specific subcategories of interactional metadiscourse. Furthermore, a significant decline in the use of certain subcategories of interactional metadiscourse has been observed over the years within the sub-discipline of second language acquisition and within the quantitative research paradigm. The findings of the present study provide novice researchers with insights into the strategic use of interactional metadiscourse, engaging readers in ways that align with the expectations of different sub-disciplinary and paradigmatic communities, and adapting flexibly to dynamic academic contexts. Additionally, the findings have implications for the development of pedagogical materials and can inform the teaching and learning of interactional metadiscourse in future English for Specific Academic Purposes courses.