Metadiscourse Features in Medical Research Articles: Subdisciplinary and Paradigmatic Influences in English and Persian

Disciplinary studies on metadiscourse in academic texts have come a rather long way (since the 1980s) to afford an awareness of the ways authors strive to signal their insights into their materials as well as their audience. However, few comprehensive corpus-based studies to date have provided a starting point for shaping our understanding of subdisciplinary and paradigmatic diversities within medical contexts in different cultures/languages. For this purpose, 160 research articles (RAs) were picked out from certain databases on medical physics (80) and nursing (80), each group of which was, then, stratified into quantitative (40) and qualitative papers (40) written in English and Persian, and their metadiscourse tokens were compared in terms of type and frequency on the basis of Hyland's (2005) taxonomy. Results indicated a rather cogent homogeneity between the native English writers (NEWs) and Iranian Persian writers (IPWs) in crafting nursing quantitative and qualitative RAs.