Variation across disciplines. The case of applied linguistics and medicine

The study compares applied linguistics and medicine abstracts by examining their structure, metadiscourse, and verbs of saying. medicine prefers the inclusion of the results and discussion moves, the situating research move and the authorial persona in the methods move. Another meaningful difference is the greater attribution of utterances to others in applied linguistics. These findings are interpreted as signaling a greater emphasis on empiricism on the part of medical authors, as well as a more elaborate construction of a community of informed readers.