While scholars in the field of writing studies have examined scientific writing from multiple perspectives, interest in its thematic structure has been modest. Recent studies suggest that the themes in scientific writing tend to be anchored on one or a few points of departure. There has also been an attempt at quantification using the…

Dictionary studies have suggested that nearly half of the English lexicon have multiple meanings. It is not yet clear, however, if second language learners reading English texts will encounter words with multiple meanings to the same degree. This study investigates the use of words with multiple meanings in an authentic English novel. Two samples…

Boosters are an important metadiscourse device for writers because it creates an emphatic impression in the reader. In addition, the competence of metadiscourse devices such as boosters is crucial in having native-fluency in academic writing. Therefore, this avoidance of using boosters may spawn foreignness in non-native writers' academic texts.…

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of…

This paper investigates how boosters are used by qualitative and quantitative research article writers to express certainty. Boosters are words such as "definitely," "sure," "demonstrate" which signal writers' assurance in what they say. Drawing on a corpus of 200 research articles in Applied Linguistics, this study…