A Comparative Analysis of Metadiscursive Nouns Across Four disciplines in Research Articles

Metadiscursive nouns are essential resources in research articles. This study does the genre analysis by investigating the use of metadiscursive nouns in the academic articles written by different fields or disciplines, which is drawing on Jiang and Hyland’s metadiscursive nouns model (2017) and the help of Python. This research compares the distribution, frequency, and functional roles of metadiscursive nouns in the four disciplines’ research articles, which are Linguistics, Education, Chemistry, and Materials Engineering.. The results show that there existed difference in the use of metadiscurive nouns among the four disciplines. This research enriches the understanding of metadiscursive nouns in interdisciplinary academic articles and it provides insights into the writing proficiency of different disciplines and offers pedagogical implications for novice academic writers and educators to address the specific challenges faced by corresponding disciplines’ scholars in improving their academic writing skills.