Avoiding Prolixity in Academic Prose; the Use of Quantity Metadiscourse in Research Articles

As part of a wider attempt to bestow the spirit of scholarly prose upon the research articles’ rhetorical structure, academic writers invariably take advantage of quantity metadiscourse markers to avoid prolixity and live up to the implicit and explicit maxims of quantity category as suggested in Gricean CP and similar models. In order to develop a clear understanding of quantity strategies distribution in academic prose, 120 research articles were selected from among recently published journals in Sciencedirect database. The articles were selected equally from two disciplines in social sciences (SS) including applied linguistics and sociology and two disciplines from natural sciences (NS) including chemistry and medicine. The linguistic realizations of metadiscursive quantity strategies comprised of endophoric markers and collapsers were estimated through a manual analysis of the corpus. The results showed that collapsing is a widespread strategy specifically among NS writers. Differences were found between SS and NS writers in their use of initials, citations and footnotes\endnotes. It is argued that collapsing is an inherent property of NS disciplines giving rise to the dense use of such markers. At the end, the implications of the study to teaching and learning writing research articles are discussed.