A comparative analysis of metadiscourse features in knowledge management research articles written in English and Persian

Abstract

This paper aims to cross-culturally inspect the interpersonal and textual features in research articles within a single discipline, Knowledge Management. The purpose of this study is to examine the two groups of context (Persian and English research articles) in order to analyze the metadiscourse features used in the introduction sections within this field. 20 research articles from Knowledge Management discipline were selected for this analysis: 10 of them from English-written articles published in international journals, and 10 from Persian-written articles published in national journals. The findings of this research reveal that the English and Persian sub-corpora show a significant difference only in one of the two types of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland, the interactional metadiscourse, and not a remarkable difference in the interactive incidence. It can be inferred from the research that linguistic and cultural differences as well as the paper writing format in general influence the writers’ choices in the use of metadiscourse features when writing their texts.