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Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing PDF

241 Pages·2005·13.288 MB·English
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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 IX

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