A Contrastive Analysis of Spanish-Arabic Metadiscourse Use in Persuasive Academic Writing

The present study joins the call of researching metadiscourse features in Spanish and Arabic languages and culture groups by comparing the use of hedges in linguistics research articles published within these languages. Based on a corpus of 90 articles collected from 6 journals of linguistics, this study seeks to detect the similarities and differences in the use of hedges in native Spanish and native Arabic linguistics research articles. Hyland's (Hyland, 2005) taxonomy of metadiscourse markers as a model of analysis to language groups has been applied. The quantitative analyses showed that the overall use of hedges in Spanish research articles is higher than in the Arabic ones. The results could have a significant impact on the area of teaching and learning Arabic as a second language in Spanish context.