November 2007 Volume 3 Issue 2
Article 2.
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Article Title
Metadiscourse in Academic Prose:
A Contrastive Analysis of English and Persian Research Articles

Author
Gholam Reza Zarei
Isfahan University of Technology, Iran

Sara Mansoori
Islamic Najafabad Azad University, Iran

Bio Data
Dr Gholam Reza Zarei received his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Isfahan University, Iran, in 2001. He is currently teaching different courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His research interests include discourse analysis, research, genre analysis and language teaching methodology.

Sara Mansoori has an MA in TEFL. She is now teaching English skill courses at undergraduate level at Azad University of Najafabad. Her areas of research include contrastive analysis, genre analysis and ESP.

Abstract
The present study was carried out to compare and contrast the use of metadiscourse elements in Persian and English research articles. The research tried to find out how English and Persian made use of metadiscourse elements, and whether the two languages differed in using metadiscourse resources in academic texts. The corpus used in this study, which was analyzed based on Hyland and Tse (2004) taxonomy, comprised 19 articles and 102,293 words in the two languages, English and Persian. The intralingual analysis showed that both Persian and English used interactive resources more than interactional ones, emphasizing the significance of text coherence over interpersonal function of language in the academic genre. Compared with English, Persian capitalized on more interactive resources, which shows that Persian puts a premium on textuality at the expense of reader involvement, hence, being comparatively less reader responsible. The results support the interlingual rhetorical differences in the use of metadiscourse resources to sustain solidarity with the readers and also to convey the intended propositional message (Mauranen, 2001; Valero-Garces, 1996; Blogojevic, 2004).

Keywords: Metadiscourse, Propositional content, Academic text, Persian language, English language

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