Metadiscourse in English and Italian: An Analysis of Popular Scientific Discourse Online

This chapter surveys the role of some metadiscourse devices in a small pilot corpus of science and technology news concerning environmental issues in English and Italian collected from online sources, i.e. Scientific American, ScienceDaily and EurekAlert! (for English) and Le Scienze (for Italian). The study compares English and Italian texts in an attempt to evaluate the extent of their correspondence and to uncover possible preferential metadiscourse strategies that are specific to each language. The analysis identifies some patterns of variation, which obviously need further research and the correlated expansion of the corpus. The English texts, for instance, display a higher number of evidentials, a different and wider variety of reporting verbs and more hedges, while the Italian ones show a higher incidence of inclusive first person plural forms of address as engagement markers.