Analyzing Metadiscourse in the English Abstracts of BA Theses

Metadiscourse is an important linguistic resource to express writers’ attitudes and to establish the relationship among writers and readers. Recently metadiscourse studies have a number of significant progresses in terms of theoretical and empirical researches. However, little attention has been drawn to the analysis of metadiscourse use in research article abstracts across different disciplines. Based on previous studies, therefore, this article takes Hyland’s (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse as the theoretical framework and adopts corpusbased approach to analyze the mode of usage and distributional features of BA theses English abstracts across three different disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Material Science and Electronic Engineering). This study is helpful to deepen our interpersonal consciousness of English academic discourse and is beneficial to enhance our understanding of the second language academic writing. Meanwhile, the study has certain implications for EFL learners’ dissertation abstract writing.