本文是一篇英语语言学论文，本研究采用语料库研究方法，从交互和互动的双重维度比较了英语本土作者和中国作者在英语学术论文中使用的元话语名词的人际功能。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In the latest two or three decades，academic writing has become the focused concern of abundant scholars, who explored either on language features with pedagogical significance or the functions that language contents perform (Hyland, 1994, 2002, 2005; Swales & Feak, 1994; Ivanc, 2002). Though groping explorations in academic writing are still ongoing, we have formed a better understanding of how academic writers engage with readers, present claims, and satisfy social engagement in the writing. This research trend has given us insights into how, besides producing knowledge, academic writers present arguments, communicate with readers, and fulfill social interaction in their writings. Academic writing remains no longer merely objective and impersonal (Conrad, 2018), and writers need to organize discourse flow, predict possible objections from readers and guide them to favorable interpretations. “The view of written texts as embodying interaction between the writer and reader is now well established” (Thompson, 2001).
Since Zellig Harris coined the term “metadiscourse” in 1959, scholars have extended their research scopes from the contents of discourse to the functions they perform (Yang, 2006). They have gradually realized that academic discourse, an important channel for disseminating and publicizing scientific claims, ideas, and concepts, conveys a significant abundance of interpersonal interactions (Myers, 1991; Ivanič, 1991). Academic writers are not satisfied with a mere observation of common facets of worldly happenings and production of texts that discuss a common interest in certain aspects of the contents of the real world. Instead, they show an enthusiastic willingness to acknowledge, create, and negotiate social interactions. The credibility of the text comes from the rationality of scientific development, and more importantly, from the authors’ proper employment of language resources. They can use these language resources to argue the claims in the text, reason the favorable discourse flow, and establish a consistent interpersonal relationship with the reader. Therefore, interpersonal interaction in academic discourse remains a research hot spot in applied linguistics, and many investigations were carried out to explore the textual representation of academic interaction through different linguistic features and rhetorical strategies.
1.2 Research Purpose
This research study sets out to comparatively explore the interpersonal functions of metadiscursive nouns between Chinese writers and native English writers. The exploration is based on two self-built corpora with tokens of 307,938 and 314,567, respectively, to uncover regular and repeated linguistic patterns of metadiscursive nouns between the two groups of academic writers. In other words, the research aims to find out the similar and different practices of metadiscursive nouns between the two groups of writers in English linguistic academic writing
