oa “Het lijkt met name ook een goede strategie”: interactionele metadiscursiviteit in abstracts van onderzoeksartikelen

Abstracts with research articles seem to constitute an objective, informative, static and predictable genre. Research by Hyland (2005a) (among others) into metadiscourse in research articles has shown that academic texts are not merely informative, but also have a persuasive goal, and as such exhibit subjective characteristics. Is this persuasive nature also true for abstracts? In this article, we investigate interactional metadiscourse of abstracts in two scholarly journals in the field of applied linguistics in the broad sense: Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing and Journal of Pragmatics. We show that interactional metadiscourse can also be found in abstracts and that certain developments can be observed through time.