Metadiscourse in the research abstracts of an interdisciplinary field: a case study of computational linguistics

Scientific world is now privileging an interdisciplinary solution to problems, and the academic discourse it rests on is typically sensitive to its disciplinary context, but the discursive features of emerging interdisciplinarity remain under-investigated. This study aims to examine the deployment of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in research abstracts spanning three fields: computational linguistics, computer science, and applied linguistics. Based on a corpus of 270 abstracts in leading journals across the fields, the analysis demonstrated that writers in computational linguistics employed a greater frequency of both interactive and interactional metadiscourse in contrast to their counterparts in applied linguistics and computer science. Specifically, frame markers and self-mentions are predominantly utilized, reflecting the interdisciplinary essence of computational linguistics. Interestingly, apart from self-mentions, other interactional metadiscoursal elements are the second most frequently utilized category in computational linguistics abstracts. This observation underlines the field’s interdisciplinary nature, extends the common thread of disciplinary variation revealed in the literature, and points to addressing the disciplinary needs of these neighboring disciplines. In addition, pedagogical implications are also raised regarding the teaching of research writing.