Poring over the findings: Interpersonal authorial engagement in applied linguistics papers

This rhetorical study investigated the employment of interpersonal metadiscourse in applied linguistics articles written in English by Anglo-American and Iranian academic writers. To this end, a representative sample of 60 conclusion sections written by the two groups of writers was selected as the corpus. The two groups of writers were compared in terms of their use of “hedges”, “emphatics”, and “attitude markers” in the extracts. The interpersonal categories were also broken down into subtypes depending on the linguistic items used, and analyzed for distribution in the conclusion sections. The functional–contextual analysis shows similarities and differences in the rhetorical behaviour of these authors in their use of interpersonal metadiscourse. There was a remarkable tendency by both writer groups towards hedging their propositions. Pronounced differences were mainly in the higher use of emphatics and attitude markers by Anglo-American authors. High certainty avoidance and abstinence from attitudinal language was noticeable amongst Iranian experts. The differences are attributed to the degree of rhetorical sensitivity to and awareness of audience, purpose, cultural leanings, and the proclivities of the disciplinary genre. The implications of this study can be helpful in academic writing, EFL writing instruction, and genre analysis.

Research highlights▶ Hedging is very common in English and Iranian applied linguists’ academic discourse. ▶ Iranian academics abstain from expressing attitudes. ▶ Cultural leanings affect the rhetoric of Iranian academic experts.