Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Political Science Journal Articles

Noor Afifah, NAWAWI and Ting, Su Hie (2021) Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Political Science Journal Articles. In: The first International Conference on Government, Education Management and Tourism (ICoGEMT) 2021, Indonesia. 9 January 2021, January 9th , 2021, Bandung, Indonesia.

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Abstract

Interactional metadiscourse markers allow writers to regulate their presence in their writings and engage with their readers. The study examined the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in political science journal articles. The specific objectives of the study were to: (1) identify the most frequently used category of interactional metadiscourse markers; (2) illustrate the functions of interactional metadiscourse markers; and (3) determine if there are significant differences in categories of interactional metadiscourse markers used across journals.Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal metadiscourse model was adapted to analyse 12 political science articles from three refereed journals. The analysis indicates the writers’ common tendencies to feature boosters and hedges as their top two functional categories. The boosters commonly used to emphasise the writers’ claims are “only”, “will”, “even” and “significant”. The hedges commonly used to withhold the writers’ commitment are “would”, “could”, “may” and “likely”. Attitude markers, engagement markers and self-mentions were present in the corpus as well with varying level of distribution. The high-frequency attitude markers are “important”, “simply”, “unfortunately” and “difficult” whereas the high-frequency engagement markers are in the form of questions, “we”, “should” and “see”. In contrast, self-mentions are infrequent in some of the political science journal articles where authorial presence was low. However, the researcher identity was more visiblein the other half of the articles with first person pronouns. The findings suggest that while the writers viewed hedges and boosters as equally important for their proposition, but not all of them are comfortable with highlighting their presence.

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