Paradigmatic Influences on Metadiscourse Features in Medical Research Articles

For the recent decades, scholars have examined the use of metadiscourse markers (MDMs) paradigmatically through several comparative studies across varying languages and cultures. No study to date, however, has investigated a comprehensive, full-fledged comparison of the possible disparities among the native English writers (NEW), Iranian English writers (IEW), and Iranian Persian writers (IPW) in crafting disciplinary research articles (RAs) in the academic field of medicine. By drawing on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse taxonomy, the present research thus embarked on this comparison through the random selection of 240 medical research articles (RAs), 120 quantitative and 120 qualitative ones. By way of comparing the three groups of writers across the two types of RAs and obtaining a stronger homogeneity between the NEW and IEW, especially relating to the quantitative papers, the results could consequently espouse the perspective that medical RA genre is less impacted by the inevitable language differences thereby giving rise to the greater importance of consensually-acknowledged disciplinary epistemology underlying medical sciences. It is then suggested that ESP classes as well as the article writing workshops held in L2 make every effort to include the interactional phase of the discourse as well.