Metadiscourse in Academic Research Articles Versus Blogs: Paul Krugman as a Case Study

The paper reports on the results of a comparative study of metadiscursive constructions in two genres of knowledge dissemination, namely research articles and blog posts. Using Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model, this study explores interactive and interactional metadiscursive clusters in a selection of research articles and blog posts written by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, extended units of language are analyzed in their contribution to the organization of the discourse and the expression of the writer’s stance towards either its content or the reader. Results from this study suggest that in research articles interactive metadiscursive constructions are accompanied by a clear manifestation of the author’s subjectivity, while in blog posts prominent is the occurrence of interactional metadiscursive resources.