Metadiscourse in Motion: Tracing Diachronic Variations in Pakistani Academic Writing Across Disciplines

Metadiscourse analysis holds great significance as it provides a way to discover the rhetorical patterns of the text. It is the way in which the language is used by a speaker or writer to regulate the flow of communication, enhance their message, and involve the audience. It is categorized into two main types. Interactive metadiscourse refers to the interaction between the speaker and listener and writer and the reader. Interactive metadiscourse involves devices like, engagement markers (e.g., “you,” “as we can see”), hedges (e.g., “perhaps,” “maybe”) and transitions (e.g., “however,” “in addition”) that help organize ideas and connect concepts. While, interactional metadiscourse show the speaker’s or writer’s stance toward the topic or situation in the content. Hyland has divided interactional metadiscourse into five major categories. They are hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. According to Hyland, metadiscourse is used in language analysis and language education in order to relate the communication of writer with the readers or the speaker with the audience (Hyland, 2005). Hence metadiscourse is a way of understanding the intended communication of the speaker or writer with the listener or reader. According to Hyland, transition markers are mainly conjunctions and adverbs that facilitate the reader in building and understanding the semantic context and meaning of the content. Therefore, the current study employs the metadiscourse framework of Hyland (2005) to investigate the language variation in the academic writing particularly in the three disciplines. This study aims to explore the diachronic variation across doctoral dissertation writing of Pakistani university students in terms of interactional meta-discourse over the last three decades, i.e. from 1990-2020 by examining the prominent textual features and the patterns of change involved in the meta-discourse in question. For this reason, 180 PhD research dissertations were collected from three major disciplines: humanities, social sciences and sciences which finally generated 10 million word corpora. All the metadiscursive devices are analyzed by applying corpus-based approach and then analyzed qualitatively. The results of study show that Pakistani research writers use interactional reach markers to make their writing more persuasive and unified.