“It is evident that …”: Boosting as a strategy employed to express author’s commitment to the truth of a proposition (a corpus-based analysis of research article abstracts)

Abstract

The article analyzes linguistic means used for boosting which is considered a crucial metadiscourse strategy regularly employed in the genre of research article abstracts. The study aims at identifying the types of booster and the frequency of occurrence of boosting markers in Russian-language research article abstracts in the field of soft and hard sciences. The study makes an attempt to reveal differences in the use of these metadiscourse patterns and suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of boosters in the two corpora. The study is based on the assumption that disciplinary conventions affect the choice of rhetorical strategies. The study draws on a corpus of 180 research article abstracts published in 12 soft and hard science journals. The theoretical basis of the study is the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers proposed by Hyland. The findings showed that soft science authors used boosting markers much less frequently than their hard science counterparts. Differences were also revealed in terms of the types of boosting. The results of the analysis confirmed the assumption that boosting as a metadiscourse strategy is determined by disciplinary conventions. The results obtained can be used both by teachers of academic writing and academic writing course designers and become an avenue for further research into metadiscourse as an important rhetorical strategy. 

Keywords

• boosting
• metadiscourse
• genre
• abstract
• academic discourse
• research article