This thesis investigates the use of meta-discourse and genre, hedging and boosting, as well as the move structures in English language abstracts of academic dissertations. Hedging and boosting are types of interpersonal meta-discourse used to express the writer's degree of doubt and certainty in the truth of a hypothesis. Differences were found concerning the move structure features and meta-discourse analysis of dissertation abstracts from three different groups of Ph.D. Students: Taiwanese, American and British. Different patterns of use for the meta-discourse also seem to be related to gender differences. Although abstracts are common in nearly all dissertation writing, this topic has been generally neglected in the English for Academic Purpose (EAP) literature. In the present study, the corpus was randomly selected from 108 dissertations in the field of English literature presented at National Taiwan University, Harvard University (USA), and Oxford University (UK). WordSmith Tools 6.0. was used to examine and analyze the data, and Ken Hyland’s model was used as the criterion for analyzing the move-structure of each article. The findings revealed that Taiwanese, American, and British Ph.D. students of literature do not usually use Ken Hyland’s five-move structure. In addition, these three groups employed hedges more than boosters, and both male and female groups used hedges more frequently in their research articles; presumably to reduce the risk of opposition.
