A Diachronic Study of Introduction Sections
A Diachronic Study of Introduction Sections

Summary/Abstract: We analyzed the introduction sections of a hundred and eighty doctoral dissertations of L1 culture over the last fifty years to discover the change concerning the utilization of interactive markers. Interactive markers are employed by writers to guide the audience throughout the piece. More application of such markers makes the text reader friendly and easy to follow and the less application of them shows the respective writing is constructed to target a more specialized audience. Using Hyland (2005) model of meta discourse, we analyzed our 262,564 words corpus for hard and soft disciplines in the three time intervals of 1966, 1986, and 2016. Findings of the study confirm that due to the overall lower deployment of interactive markers in the introduction sections of our corpus, the genre is likely meant to be read by community members rather than a general audience of diverse disciplines.No evident disciplinary difference was found except for the overall trend change which is positive and negative respectively in the hard and soft disciplines.

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