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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 30:3 (2025) ► pp.316–351

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Interactive metadiscourse across languages and writer groups

A comparison among L1 Chinese, L2 English and L1 English research articles

ORCiD logo with link | Fujian Normal University | The University of Auckland
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
ORCiD logo with link | China Three Gorges University
Published online: 18 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22116.gon
Abstract
Although English has become a lingua franca for academic publication, a growing number of multilingual scholars prefer to publish in both English and their first languages. This corpus-based study investigates how Chinese scholars in applied linguistics deploy interactive metadiscourse in their published Chinese and L2 English research articles, compared with those of L1 English writers. Both Chinese character(zì)-based and word(cí)-based units were used to segment and quantify the Chinese corpus, yielding two contrasting sets of results in the cross-linguistic comparisons. To ensure a conceptually equivalent comparison, we opted for word-based results, showing that the L1 Chinese corpus evidenced more frequent interactive metadiscoursal features than both the L1 and L2 English corpora. The latter two corpora, by contrast, revealed similar patterns of distribution. The divergences and convergences between Chinese and English corpora indicate linguacultural influences on interactive metadiscourse and reveal the methodological constraints on analysis of similar linguistic features.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cross-linguistic research on metadiscourse
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus construction
    • 3.2Tokenization and standardization
    • 3.3Analytical framework and data coding
    • 3.4Quantitative analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall distribution of interactive metadiscourse
    • 4.2Influences of standardization methods on cross-linguistic comparison
    • 4.3Interactive metadiscourse across the sub-corpora
      • 4.3.1Transitions
      • 4.3.2Frame markers
      • 4.3.3Endophoric markers
      • 4.3.4Code glosses
      • 4.3.5Evidentials
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Linguacultural influences on interactive metadiscourse in Chinese and English
    • 5.2Interactive metadiscourse between L1 and L2 English
    • 5.3Methodological influences on Chinese-English contrastive research
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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