Metadiscursive Nouns in Doctoral Dissertations: A Comparison of Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

In today's academic world, speaking to readers and creating a credible authorial self in academic texts by means of linguistic devices are essential to become a competent member of an academic discipline. Among these linguistic devices, metadiscourse receives a prominent place. Studies have suggested the key role of metadiscourse in achieving a persuasive academic claim-making. Surprisingly, far too little attention has been paid to the role of nouns in this process. Considering this gap, this study explicated the use of metadiscursive nouns in doctoral dissertations written by American academic writers of English and Turkish-speaking academics of English in a corpus of 60 doctoral dissertations by using the taxonomy of metadiscursive nouns suggested by Jiang and Hyland (2016). Specifically, it focused on how these nouns were employed by native and nonnative academic writers of English to signal their authorial stance in their doctoral dissertations. The frequency analysis was performed through Wordsmith Tool 6.0. Log likelihood statistic was applied to find out whether there was a statistical difference between these two groups of academic authors regarding the use of metadiscursive nouns. The results showed that both groups of academic writers displayed similarities on the overall use of metadiscoursive nouns. In terms of categorical use, similar employment of metadiscursive nouns was also observed between the two corpora. Entity was the most frequently applied category, which was followed by attribute and relation. The frequency counts of these linguistic devices revealed their prominent role in establishing interaction in academic genres by offering writers a way of organizing their texts and mitigating their stance. Hence, they might be integrated to the curricula of academic writing courses