Constructing Gender through Metadiscourse: A Corpus-Based Inter-Disciplinary Study of Research Dissertations of Pakistani M. Phil Graduates

Abstract

Viewed in the social context, academic writing is considered a site where both writers and readers are engaged in an interactive mode of presentation and evaluation of information. Male and female writers may differently exemplify the interactive mode of presenting and evaluating information through meta-discourse markers. The current research paper aims to explore the role of gender in the use of hedges and boosters in research dissertations of Pakistani M.Phil graduates particularly concerning disciplinary variation. For this purpose, the taxonomy Hyland’s (2005) meta-discourse markers are used to identify the lists of hedges and boosters. A corpus consisting of one hundred research dissertations representing humanities, social sciences and sciences is developed, and further tagged with Antconc 3.3.4 to find out the frequencies and instances of hedges and boosters in male and female academic writing. The results reveal that overall hedges have been found as the more preferred meta-discourse markers than boosters in the academic discourse of Pakistani MPhil graduates.  Females are more inclined towards the use of hedges, whereas, males are prone to the use of boosters in the presentation of academic discourse.  The study has pedagogical implications for the writing practices of both students as well as supervisors.