A contrastive study of metadiscourse in English and Arabic linguistics research articles

Abstract

The present paper analyzes metadiscourse expressions to understand the cultural differences between English and Arabic-speaking researchers. It uses a contrastive corpus of seventy discussion sections of linguistics research articles written by native speakers of English and Arabic. Within metadiscourse there appear to be two types: interactive and interactional. Chi-square tests are carried out to clarify the probable differences between both groups.