CONTENTS // INTRODUCTION 7 // I THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 9 // 1 Academic discourse 10 // 1.1 Delimiting the field 10 // 1.2 Social constructionist perspective of academic discourse 11 // 1.3 Social context of academic discourse 12 // 1.4 ‘Myth of impersonality’ in academic writing 14 // 1.5 Research on interpersonality in academic writing: “the interpersonal turn” 16 // 2 Metadiscourse 19 // 2.1 History of metadiscourse 19 // 2.2 Two main approaches to metadiscourse 21 // 2.3 Terminology - definitions of the terms used in metadiscourse research 24 // 2.4 Criticism of metadiscourse theory 26 // 3 Metadiscourse and genre analysis 29 // 3.1. The concept of genre 29 // 3.2 The genre of undergraduate textbook and research article 34 // 4 Aims and methodology 38 // 4.1 Aims and research questions 38 // 4.2 Research methodology 38 // 4.3 Corpus 41 // II METADISCOURSE IN UNDERGRADUATE TEXTBOOKS AND RESEARCH ARTICLES: ANALYTICAL PART 43 // 5 Overview of the quantitative analysis 44 // 6 The life of a scientific fact 50 // 6.1 Hedges 52 // 3 // 6.2 Evidentials 54 // 6.3 The classification of statement types revisited 56 // 6.4 Conclusion 57 // 7 Hedges 59 // 7.1 Models of hedges in scientific writing 61 // 7.2 Linguistic realization of hedging 66 // 7.3 Hedging in textbooks and research articles 68 // 8 Boosters 73 // 9 Attitude markers 76 // 9.1 Attitude markers in undergraduate textbooks and RAs compared 77 // 9.2 Collocations with hedges 83 // 10 Engagement markers 85 // 10.1 Pronoun