Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing

241 Pages·2005·13.288 MB·English

by  Ken Hyland

Metadiscourse:
Exploring Interaction in
Writing
Ken Hyland
Continuum
Metadiscourse
Continuum Discourse Series
Series Editor: Professor Ken Hyland, Institute of Education, University
of London
Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary
thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways
language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and
with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. The
Continuum Discourse Series aims to capture the fast-developing
interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced
teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English
language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic
in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable
introduction to an aspect of the way language in used in real life.
Other titles in the series (forthcoming):
Discourse Analysis: An Introduction
Brian Paltridge
Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis
Paul Baker
Spoken Discourse: An Introduction
Diana Slade and Helen Joyce
Historical Discourse: The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation
Caroline Coffin
Metadiscourse
Exploring Interaction in Writing
Ken Hyland
continuum
LONDON • NEW YORK
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SEl 7NX
15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010
© Ken Hyland 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
First published 2005
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0-8264-7610-4 (hardback)
0-8264-7611-2 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Tradespools, Frome, Somerset
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface ix
Section 1: What is metadiscourse? 1
Chapter 1 First impressions 3
1.1 A brief overview of metadiscourse 3
1.2 A context of emergence: information and
interaction 6
1.3 Metadiscourse and audience awareness 9
1.4 Metadiscourse, interaction and audience 11
1.5 Summary and conclusion 14
Chapter 2 Definitions, issues and classifications 16
2.1 Definitions of metadiscourse 16
2.2 Prepositional and metadiscourse meanings 18
2.3 'Levels of meaning' 21
2.4 Functional analyses 24
2.5 ‘Textual’ and ‘interpersonal’ functions 26
2.6 Metadiscourse signals 27
2.7 Categorizations of metadiscourse 32
2.8 Summary and conclusions 35
Chapter 3 A metadiscourse model 37
3.1 Key principles of metadiscourse 37
3.2 A classification of metadiscourse 48
3.3 Metadiscourse resources 50
3.4 An illustration: metadiscourse in postgraduate
writing 54
3.5 The limits of description 58
3.6 Summary and conclusions 59
Contents
Section 2: Metadiscourse in practice 61
Chapter 4 Metadiscourse and rhetoric 63
4.1 The concept of rhetoric 63
4.2 Academic discourse and rhetoric 65
4.3 Metadiscourse, ethos and
The Origin of Species 67
4.4 Business discourse and metadiscourse 71
4.5 Metadiscourse and rhetoric in company
annual reports 73
4.6 Summary and conclusions 85
Chapter 5 Metadiscourse and genre 87
5.1 The concept of genre 87
5.2 Metadiscourse and genre 88
5.3 Metadiscourse in academic research
articles 89
5.4 Metadiscourse in popular science articles 93
5.5 Metadiscourse in introductory textbooks 101
5.6 Summary and conclusionss 111
Chapter 6 Metadiscourse and culture 113
6.1 Culture and language 113
6.2 Metadiscourse across languages 116
6.3 Metadiscourse and writing in English 124
6.4 Interactive metadiscourse in English 124
6.5 Interactional metadiscourse in English 128
6.6 Summary and conclusions 136
Chapter 7 Metadiscourse and community 138
7.1 The concept of community 138
7.2 Community, academic writing and
metadiscourse 141
7.3 Metadiscourse variation in articles across
disciplines 143
7.4 Interactional metadiscourse in articles
across disciplines 144
7.5 Interactive metadiscourse in articles across
disciplines 156
VI
Contents
7.6 Metadiscourse variation in textbooks across
disciplines 161
7.7 Interactional metadiscourse in textbooks
across disciplines 163
7.8 Interactive metadiscourse in textbooks across
disciplines 166
7.9 Summary and conclusions 170
Section 3: Issues and implications 173
Chapter 8 Metadiscourse in the classroom 175
8.1 Students, writing and audience awareness 175
8.2 Advantages of teaching metadiscourse features 178
8.3 Some teaching principles 181
8.4 Some teaching strategies 185
8.5 Summary and conclusions 192
Chapter 9 Issues and directions 194
9.1 Metadiscourse and the socially situated writer 194
9.2 Metadiscourse and interpersonal engagement 195
9.3 Metadiscourse and discourse variation 196
9.4 Metadiscourse and classroom practice 197
9.5 Methodological issues 198
9.6 Some implications and remaining issues 199
9.7 Further research 200
References 204
Appendix: Metadiscourse items investigated 218
Subject Index 225
Author Index 228
VII
Acknowledgements
This book results from a long and tempestuous relationship with
metadiscourse that has intrigued and frustrated me in equal parts for
over ten years. I must therefore thank those whose scepticism,
suspicions and critical insights have encouraged me to stubbornly
refuse to abandon the idea. Among these I most want to acknowledge
John Swales, Sue Hood and Chris Candlin, colleagues and friends
whose knowledge and enthusiasm for understanding discourse is a
constant inspiration. More recently, I have been encouraged by Polly
Tse, my research assistant in Hong Kong, whose collaboration on a
metadiscourse project helped me to a new appetite for metadiscourse
and a fresh understanding into how it works. I am also grateful to Jenny
Lovel at Continuum Press for being a good person to work with and for
supporting this book and the series it is in. Finally, as always, my
thanks go to Fiona Hyland, for saving me from even more embarrassing
errors by reading the entire manuscript, for her stimulating thoughts
on writing, and for her constant support and encouragement.
VIII
Preface
Students are often told that successful writing in English is ‘reader-
friendly'. It must fit together logically, be signposted to guide readers,
and take their likely responses and processing difficulties into account.
But it also needs to work for the writer too, as we communicate for a
reason. We use language to persuade, inform, entertain or perhaps just
engage an audience, and this means conveying an attitude to what we
say and to our readers. These functions are collectively known as
metadiscourse: the linguistic expressions which refer to the evolving
text and to the writer and imagined readers of that text.
The concept of metadiscourse is based on a view of writing as
social engagement. It represents the writer's awareness of the
unfolding text as discourse: how we situate ourselves and our readers
in a text to create convincing, coherent prose in particular social
contexts. By setting out ideas in ways our interlocutors are likely to
accept, conveying an appropriate writer personality, and engaging
with them in appropriate ways, we create the social interactions
which make our texts effective. These interactional functions have
attracted increasing attention in recent years as researchers have
widened their focus beyond the ideas texts contain to the ways they
function interpersonally. It is now recognized that written texts not
only concern people, places and activities in the world, but also
acknowledge, construct and negotiate social relations. The ability of
writers to use metadiscourse effectively, to control the level of
personality in their texts by offering a credible representation of
themselves and their ideas, is coming to be seen as a defining feature
of successful writing.
For many people, metadiscourse is an intuitively attractive
concept as it seems to offer a principled way of collecting under one
heading the diverse range of linguistic devices writers use to explicitly
organize their texts, engage readers and signal their attitudes to their
material and their audience. This promise, however, has never been
fully realized, Metadiscourse remains under-theorized and empirically
vague. The failure to pin the concept down precisely has meant that it
has not achieved its explanatory potential or allowed analysts to
confidently operationalize it in real texts. This lack of theoretical
rigour and empirical explicitness has made analysis an elusive and
frustrating experience. It also, however, forms the rationale for this
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