Text-organising metatext in research articles: an English-Slovene contrastive analysis

The paper presents a contrastive analysis focusing on the differences in the use of two selected metatext categories, previews and reviews, in English and Slovene research articles. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that the use of the selected metatext categories is more restricted in Slovene academic writing than in English academic writing. Thirty-two research articles from the fields of mathematics and archaeology (16 in English and 16 in Slovene) are analysed according to a set of criteria established in advance, and the quantitative results of the analysis are further examined statistically. The results show that the number of occurrences of the selected metatext categories in the sample of English research articles is larger than in the sample of Slovene articles, although the difference in the use of the selected metatext categories is smaller between the two languages than between the two disciplines.