An intercultural analysis of metadiscourse features in research articles written in English and in Spanish

In the last few decades the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analysing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain.

► The language and context of publication affect the use of metadiscourse in business management RAs.
► Local RAs in Spanish and international RAs in English feature a different use of metadiscourse.
► The divergent use of metadiscourse creates a different writer–reader relationship in each context.
► Differences in the encoding of interpersonality should be taken into account by prospective RA authors.
► Disciplinary fields can present language/cultural sub-sets which show different writing conventions.