Metadiscourse use in dissertation discussion chapters in applied linguistics and sociology

The dissertation discussion chapter is considered one of the most rhetorically complex parts of a dissertation, where dissertation writers need to explicitly signal text relations, position their stances in relation to extant research and their own findings, engage readers, and assert the contributions of their research. One important way to achieve these rhetorical purposes is through metadiscourse. To investigate dissertation writers’ metadiscourse use in the discussion chapters across disciplines, this study employed Hyland’s metadiscourse (2019) model to analyse a corpus of twenty dissertation discussion chapters from two social sciences disciplines: applied linguistics (AL) and sociology (SOC). Results showed that the two groups of dissertation writers appropriated a majority of the metadiscoursal items similarly, yet significant differences occurred in the use of evidentials, code glosses, and self-mentions (p < .05). The results highlight the situated nature of metadiscourse and shed light on the preferred patterns of metadiscoursal usage in AL and SOC dissertation discussion chapters. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .