This study explores metadiscourse in English-medium Master’s theses by L2 (Czech) graduates, aiming to explain how Czech students organise their texts, express their stance towards the content and engage with their readers. It seeks to contrast L2 learner academic discourse with L1 learner and expert academic discourse in order to identify differences along the culture and level of expertise dimensions. The corpus-based analysis employs Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal framework of metadiscourse to identify the frequency, functions and realisations of interactive and interactional metadiscourse devices. The findings reveal that interactional metadiscourse is more prominent than interactive metadiscourse in all three corpora and there are significant differences in the realisation patterns and functions of specific metadiscourse markers. The results of the analysis suggest that self-mention, hedges and engagement markers vary along the expertise dimension as they are more heavily used in published research articles than in learner discourse. Cultural differences (i.e., those stemming primarily from different academic writing conventions) seem to affect the preferred degree of writer visibility, as well as preferences for specific metadiscourse markers. Variation in interactive metadiscourse seems to be influenced by text size, genre and communicative purpose. The findings allow for the drawing of several implications for L2 writing pedagogy.

The present study analyzed Engagement strategies used in political discourse, examining how politicians construe certain stances relative to other voices and how they align or dis-align with their audience. To this end, the study employed Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory to examine the Engagement resources utilized in speeches delivered by the 46th US President Joe Biden and the 45th and 47th President Donald Trump during their campaigns for the 2024 US presidential election during their campaigns for the 2024 US presidential election. Instances of Engagement were identified, tallied, and classified into their respective sub-categories. The findings showed a consistent pattern in terms of the frequencies of the sub-categories of Engagement in the two speeches, with Heteroglossia being more frequent than Monoglossia. Results of the normalized frequencies indicated that contracted and expanded resources were more often employed by Trump than by Biden. However, a fine-grained analysis underscored distinct stylistic differences in the utilization of these resources by the two speakers. The study sheds light on the nuanced nature of political discourse and provides insights into how politicians use Engagement resources to construe certain stances and to communicate with their audience

Previous studies showed that as a result of intense competition to succeed in academic pursuits such as publishing research papers and securing grants, promotional language known as hypes are pervasive in academic texts. This paper investigates hypes in a corpus of undergraduate thesis abstracts written by Indonesian English learners in a span of ten years, from 2011 to 2020. Taking a corpus-based approach, it examines the extent to which hypes are used in the thesis abstracts, including their linguistic manifestations, frequencies over the years, and the values they promote. We found hypes in all five moves of thesis abstracts, but they were most frequent in the introduction, in which they emphasized the importance and novelty of the research and stress the urgency of the research problems. In the span of the ten years, the frequencies of hypes generally increase, indicating the students’ awareness of the need to convince thesis supervisors, board of examiners, and their colleagues and the efforts to stand out in a competitive academic landscape. Important, investigate, and reveal were the most frequent hype words over the years and their instances suggest a growing emphasis on significance, a stronger commitment to evidence-based research, and desire to contribute new and concrete findings.

This paper examines the rhetorical strategies of mobilising and inspiring a domestic audience for national identity re/construction in order to reinforce the Nigerian brand. Data for the study are composed of some branding strategies packaged and broadcast mainly on radio and television by Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Information and Communications in its rebranding campaign in 2009 which was targeted at the domestic citizens' value re-orientation. The study adopts Fairclough's dialectical-relational approach which centres on "dialectical reasoning" – a way of reasoning from critique of discourse to what should be done to change existing reality, by way of explanation of relations between discourse and other components (social, cultural and political) of reality. It then applies the tenets of the theory to analyse the rhetorical strategies in the rebranding campaign, as the domestic citizens' agency is considered instrumental in bolstering the Nigerian brand. The study demonstrates that the branding strategies analysed largely invoke history, collective memory, values, traditions, and aspirations which could appeal to the domestic citizens' nationalistic sensibilities and imaginaries to evolve an enduring Nigerian brand which is domestic-driven.

The current study is part of a longitudinal research project into the relationship between students’ ways of recontextualising their doctoral degree experience and eventual programme completion. Building on earlier findings reported in De Rycker (2014, 2022), the objective is to examine the hidden ontology of “doing a doctoral degree”. The primary data consist in structured interviews conducted with 20 doctoral students at the Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Using Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic model for the critical study of discourse, the analysis of the interviews produced two major empirical findings. First, doctoral students’ discourse is characterised by a strong sense of personal agency but also a lack of specificity and a simplification of the overall practice complex, in which doing research seems to be reduced to mere semiotic actions. Secondly, students construe “doing a doctoral degree” as a mystifying process replete with paradoxes. Further interpretative analysis suggests that semiotic action representations play a significant role as self-enhancing metonyms for “doing research”, helping students to demystify the academic practice and resolve some of its inherent contradictions. Implications for supervisory practice as well as the larger research project will be discussed.

Linguistically, interactive metadiscourse devices are responsible for creating an unfolding and persuasive piece of writing. They help writers come up with a cohesive and reader-friendly text and highlight how they control the interactive meaning. This corpus-driven study is an attempt to explore the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in English dentistry research articles published in International ISI-indexed and Iranian local research-based journals. The aim was to see if interactive resources, as realized by rhetorical options, such as transitions, code glosses, endophoric markers, evidentials, and frame markers, are predisposed to discipline-specific rhetorical conventions. To this end, fourty dentistry research articles were analyzed using Hyland’s (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse. The results disclosed similarities and differences in both the frequency and use of interactive resources between the two sets of research articles. The present results are expected to extend our understanding of authorial preferences for the use of metadiscourse markers in tandem with discourse functions in research articles in the selected discipline. The results of such studies may also improve different features of language pedagogy, such as teaching and learning academic writing, namely research articles.

This article scrutinizes metadiscourse in English-medium academic prose by Russian writers from two different discourse communities focusing on the ways they interact with the reader and present themselves and their research results. It is assumed that the distribution of interactional metadiscourse elements varies across disciplines. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse which offers a pragmatically-grounded method of studying metadiscourse in academic texts. The study was carried out on a corpus of 156 abstracts derived from two Russian journals in the field of linguistics and computer engineering. The study confirmed Hyland’s findings about research article abstracts in the humanities and hard sciences, though it revealed some distinctive features of English-medium research article abstracts by Russian writers. The findings can enhance English L2 novice academic writers’ familiarity with the academic writing conventions in the discipline.

This study is an attempt to highlight the proximization strategies used in the Covid-19 preventive guidelines issued by the government of Pakistan. The theory of proximization (Cap 2017) has been taken as a theoretical framework for the present study and the analysis of the selected texts is guided by the spatial-temporal-axiological (STA) model (Cap 2013b). The guidelines issued by the government of Pakistan between March 25 and May 6, 2020, for the prevention of the disease have been selected as a sample for this study as they are expected to carry governmental plans for fighting the disease and the coercive strategies that have been used in order to make people act accordingly. Just like war, the situation of the pandemic spread calls for quick proposal of coercive strategies and their presentation in a way that can get the people on board with the institutional plans. With this in mind, the sample has been descriptively analyzed for the linguistic choices that indicate the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization of the threat (Covid-19) in the light of proximization theory (Cap 2017). The results show that there are a significant number of linguistic markers that link the disease prevention discourse with the political intervention discourse, justifying the application of proximization theory (Cap 2017) to both of them. The evidence collected during the analysis establishes that the authorities use proximization strategies in disease prevention discourse in order to add to the fear appeal which helps in soliciting unconditional and quick legitimization of the proposed plan of action against the spreading disease.

Modality expresses high probability and total degree through boosters (Halliday 1985,Holmes 1990). Through them, writers reinforce statements with the assurance of reliableknowledge (cf. Hyland 1998b). This study compares the usage of boosting emphasizers (e.g. certainly) and intensifiers (e.g. completely) (cf. Quirk et al. 1985) and their orientation and manifestation (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) in Albanian and Italian student academic writings in L1 and English as an L2. I compiled an Italian and an Italian English corpus (around 3 million words each) as well as an Albanian corpus (around 2.2 million words) and Albanian English one (around 700,000 words). The corpora are comparable in terms of genre, disciplinary domain, gender and the division of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. Since very little research has been conducted on academic writing in Albania (Toska 2015), it is essential to initiate research in this field. The results showed that boosters were significantly favored in Italian and Italian English and less favored in Albanian. Conclusively, Italians show more commitment than Albanians.