A COMPARATIVE INVESTIGATION OF METADISCOURSE IN ENGLISH AND PERSIAN ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH ARTICLES

Abstract

The present article reports a comparative study of interactional metadiscourse markers in English and Persian research articles. Drawing on Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study investigates the employment of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers in a corpus composed of the post-method sections of 100 research articles (50 English and 50 Persian) in the field of architecture. Overall, it was found that there are statistically significant differences between the frequencies of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers used in English and Persian sub-corpora. Yet, the linguistic and functional analyses unveiled some basic similarities between the two languages in their epistemic metadiscourse strategies. The findings provide deep insights into the rhetorical conventions and norms in architectural articles and offer a broader perspective towards discoursing patterns and persuasion strategies of English and Iranian academic writers in this field.