The Use of Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in English Book Reviews Across Disciplines

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the frequency and type of stance and engagement features in each move of book reviews of soft and hard disciplines according to Hyland’s (2005) Interactional Metadiscourse taxonomy. A corpus of 102 book reviews published by 30 first quality journals in 6 disciplines was randomly selected and analyzed. The results indicated a significant difference between book reviews in terms of stance markers. Furthermore, Move 2 (Outlining) enjoyed the highest frequency of stance features, while move 4 (Evaluation) contained the least frequency of stance features. Also, a significant difference was observed in the use of stance markers in Introducing, Outlining, and Highlighting. However, using engagement markers, the significant difference was only in the highlighting.