Interactive metadiscourse across languages and writer groups

Abstract Although English has become a lingua franca for academic publication, a growing number of multilingual scholars prefer to publish in both English and their first languages. This corpus-based study investigates how Chinese scholars in applied linguistics deploy interactive metadiscourse in their published Chinese and L2 English research articles, compared with those of L1 English writers. Both Chinese character( zì )-based and word( cí )-based units were used to segment and quantify the Chinese corpus, yielding two contrasting sets of results in the cross-linguistic comparisons. To ensure a conceptually equivalent comparison, we opted for word-based results, showing that the L1 Chinese corpus evidenced more frequent interactive metadiscoursal features than both the L1 and L2 English corpora. The latter two corpora, by contrast, revealed similar patterns of distribution. The divergences and convergences between Chinese and English corpora indicate linguacultural influences on interactive metadiscourse and reveal the methodological constraints on analysis of similar linguistic features.