An Exploration of interactive and Interactional Relationship (Metadiscourse) in Research Discourses of Pakistan through Corpus-based TechniquesAn Exploration of interactive and Interactional Relationship (Metadiscourse) in Research Discourses of Pakistan through Corpus-based Techniques

Abstract

Various manifestations of English language including English for specific, academic and research purposes have been witnessed in the recent two decades owing to expansion of English as a global language (Mauranen, 2013; Crystal, 2012). These manifestations have led, in the recent years, register and genre based investigations on variations of language, culture and disciplines which have revealed distinct cognitive schema of the discourse practitioners. These investigations offered new discursive and pragmatic insights of exploring a current shift from text to text producers and text consumers as metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005). This focus has sensitized many researchers across languages, cultures and disciplines to investigate interactive and interactional patterns grounded in discourses in general and research discourses in particular (Hu, & Cao, 2015; Akbas, 2014). However, disciplinary variation of this twofold interaction needs to have more attention of the researchers (Hyland, 2017) to find out distinct set of metadiscursive attitudes and behaviors of different academic tribes. Therefore, the current study aims at exploring this two-way interactive phenomenon of negotiation, persuasion and engagement in a corpus of 354146 words comprising of 104 research articles published in Pakistani research journals from Hard Sciences and Soft Sciences. Hyland’s (2005) framework of interpersonal model was applied through an exclusive corpus tool i.e MetaPak (Abbas et al., 2017b) in the present study. Along with discovering prototypicality in intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary variation of metadiscourse, I found a new phenomenon of interpersonal role of author exclusivity in Pakistani research discourses. This new dimension of self-mention may serve as a significant framework for investigating interactive and interactional role of author exclusive pronouns. In addition, variation of metadiscourse found across disciplines of Hard Sciences and Soft Sciences in the current study also contributes in the existing exegeses of knowledge pertaining to metadiscourse. This disciplinary variation was found with various quantitative patterns. For example, Code Glosses were found the most dominant interactive metadiscursive strategy employed in both the fields of Hard Sciences and Soft Sciences. In this study I have identified and established few more forms of Code Glosses marked off by parentheses including numeric, acronyms, and abbreviation as sources of meaning elaboration. In addition, more employment of Evidentials in Soft Sciences than Hard Sciences with normalized values of 442.6 and 324.8 respectively were also noticed. And more importantly, the development of MetaPak as a result of this study would facilitate enhancing the research of metadiscourse.