Analysis of the functions of metastructures in scientific and technical discourse (using English-language materials)

The article deals with the functions of metastructures in the scientific and technical discourse using English-language scientific articles (from the Robotics journal) freely available on the Internet and the method of the corpus-oriented discourse analysis. The relevance of the work is due to the lack of the research on metastructures in the said type of discourse, especially using the corpus-based approach. The AntConc corpus analysis instrument is used to perform a more accurate statistical analysis of the metastructure functions frequency. AntConc provides the possibility to reveal lexical variation of metastructures performing certain functions. In this regard, the purpose of the article is to identify and describe the functions of metastructures in the scientific and technical discourse. All the functions are classified into seven groups: interpretation function, evaluation function, confirmation of the facts mentioned above by illustration, text formation function, details reduction function, dialogue function, and commentary function. The article concludes that the most and the least frequent usage of metastructures performing certain functions is explained by the authors’ intentions to guide the reader’s reception process, as well as by the recipient’s competence.