«Revisiting metadiscourse: Conceptual and methodological issues concerning signalling nouns»

John Flowerdew
«Revisiting metadiscourse: Conceptual and methodological issues concerning signalling nouns»
Ibérica, n.º 29, Spring 2015

Ibérica | Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos | Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos | Universitat Jaume I de Castelló | Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials | Departament d'Estudis Anglesos | Castelló | ESPAÑA

Extracto los subapartados del apartado 3 (del artículo completo, PDF / HTML):
→ Metadiscourse as interpersonal or textual
→ The size of the linguistic unit
→ The multi-functionality of metadiscourse items
→ Representativeness in corpus-based approaches to metadiscourse
→ References

«Metadiscourse as interpersonal or textual

»An issue that has already come up more than once in the above brief review of the literature is that of the relationship between the claimed interpersonal and textual functions of metadiscourse. As we have seen, early theoreticians such as vande Kopple, divided metadiscourse according to these two types of meaning. however, as Ädel has noted, the understanding of the term “textual” departs from that of halliday. For halliday, the textual function is concerned with cohesion, theme/rheme and given/new. vande Kopple’s “text connectives” would seem to fit in here, but the other categories she classifies as textual – code glosses, validity markers and narrators – seem to go beyond this. They seem to be more interpersonal, in fact. validity markers (words like “perhaps”, “may”, “might”, “undoubtedly”), to take just one of these sub-categories, would be classified as markers of modality, according to halliday, and thus come under the interpersonal function.

»Another point made by Ädel (2006: 17) is that the textual and interpersonal functions are not at the same level. If the primary function of metadiscourse is to guide readers or listeners in how to interpret the propositional content of the text, then this is clearly interpersonal rather than textual. Ädel (2006: 17) points out that, in line with this view, mauranen (1993) argues that a textual function for metadiscourse is superfluous and that the fundamental function is interpersonal. As we have also seen, hyland joins mauranen and Ädel in this view and sees all metadiscourse as interpersonal. I will return to this issue very briefly in my discussion of SNs.

»The size of the linguistic unit

»Because metadiscourse is a functional phenomenon, it goes without saying that there is no single formal linguistic category which can be identified as its mode of realisation. It can be noted from the examples given in the above literature review, that metadiscourse units may take the form of individual words, phrases, clauses or even whole series of clauses. Indeed, the unit of analysis tends to vary according to the analyst, some preferring larger units and some smaller.

»Ädel (2006: 41) suggests that smaller units are more useful if a researcher is interested in finding out the greatest possible differences and uses of metadiscourse across texts, while larger units of analysis are more useful if a researcher is interested in distinguishing between metadiscourse and nonmetadiscourse across texts. Ädel and mauranen (2010) refer to the former approach as “thin” and the latter as “thick”. The thin approach, they argue, is more suited to quantitative methods and the thick approach is better suited to more qualitatively oriented methods.

»Ädel (2006: 52) also makes the point that, if the sentence is taken as the unit of analysis, then it is not possible to maintain the precept that metadiscourse is non-propositional, because there are bound to be propositions in whole sentences (or clauses). however, this is to assume that smaller units cannot carry propositional meaning, which is not the case. Another, more convincing, argument presented by Ädel, is that, in employing the larger unit, a whole clause or sentence is likely to carry with it more than one metadiscoursal function (a point I will return to in the next section on multi-functionality).

»For corpus-based approaches (e.g. hyland, 2005; Ädel, 2006), a further advantage of smaller units is that a much larger number of search terms can be employed (e.g. hyland, 2005, includes some 300 items in his inventory of metadiscourse items). with the corpus approach, however, one cannot be sure that a given item is always employed in its metadiscoursal function. As hyland states, “[i]t must be remembered, of course, that all items can realize either propositional or metadiscoursal meanings and that many can express either interactive or interpersonal meanings” (page 218). Based on this, hyland argues that every item should be studied in its sentential context.

»Although hyland may argue that every item should be treated in such a way, it is not clear if this is actually the case in his own work. This is not such a big problem if the aim of a study is to compare two corpora, provided that the same list of search terms is used in each. however, it does mean that no categorical statements can be made about the frequency of metadiscourse items in any given corpus. Claims can only be made in relative terms, comparing one (sub-)corpus to another. In the case of Ädel (2006), on the other hand, with the use of a smaller set of items than hyland’s 300 (she searched on subject forms of first and second person pronouns for her personal metadiscourse category and 61 words and lemmas for her impersonal category), makes it clear that the non-metadiscoursal items were eliminated from her counts (by manual analysis) and she is thus able to make clear-cut claims about the frequency of the metadiscourse items she includes in her searches.

»The multi-functionality of metadiscourse items

»Another issue in metadiscourse research is the fact that items recognised as metadiscursive may perform more than one function at the same time. This problem is greater the larger the unit of analysis, as already noted above. For example, in hyland’s model (see Table 2) “my purpose is noted” is given as an example of a frame marker; however, “my”, which is a part of this unit, is given as an example of an engagement marker. So there is clearly overlap here. To give another example, in Ädel’s model (Table 4), “my conclusion” is given as an example of the Personal – writer oriented category (presumably because of the “my”), but, although it is not given as an example, “conclusion” could also be classified as Impersonal –Text/Code-oriented (by analogy with the two examples given of “question” and “definition”).

»The solution adopted by Ädel (2006: 25) to the problem of multifunctionality is to decide on one of the possible functions as primary and to classify the item accordingly. This problem is less likely to arise, it can be pointed out, if single items are taken as the unit of analysis.

»Representativeness in corpus-based approaches to metadiscourse

»The sampling procedures of Ädel and hyland referred to in the previous paragraph highlight the fact that such corpus approaches can only give a description of a well-defined sample of (potential) metadiscourse rather than covering the full range of metadiscourse in a given corpus. hyland (2005: 29), for example, states that he does not include indicators of affect or lexical evaluation (e.g. evaluative adjectives) in his model, because an operationalization of the model at such a level of delicacy would be impractical.

»Another problem with empirical studies of metadiscourse highlighted by hyland (2005: 30) is that of “insider opacity”, i.e. how discourse communities may have understandings of metadiscoursal features which are inaccessible to the analyst. This is particularly the case if the analysis is of academic discourse, which may involve a lot of “insider” language. Such language, of course, cannot be incorporated into corpus searches unless the analyst is helped by a specialist informant or informants.

»A further issue with corpus approaches is how to balance out the different categories in any model. If we take a taxonomy such as that of hyland (2005), for example, which has two major categories (interactive and interactional), with five sub-categories in each, an issue is how to avoid overor under-representing a category in the searches. For example, in his inventory of search terms, hyland has far fewer code glosses than he does boosters. Presumably, these lists are derived from a word and/or clusters frequency list. But does the higher representation of one category as compared to another indicate that this category is more important or significant in metadiscourse terms than the other? That is to say, does it play a bigger role in communicating how the message is to be interpreted by the reader/listener? This issue is especially important when it comes to pedagogical application. As has been noted on many occasions (e.g. Swales, 2002), high frequency does not always mean high pedagogical priority [nota: In corpus terms, the question of where priority should lie can be at least partially answered by work with learner corpora (e.g. Ädel, 2006; Noble, 2006). Such work can indicate where learners’ main difficulties lie].

»To make a final point concerning the representativeness of corpus findings, I offer the following quotation from Ädel (2006: 48):

»A review of the literature on metadiscourse makes it clear that, for the most part, scholars do not mention methods of counting, let alone the difficulties involved.

»If we do not know how the findings of a study have been arrived at, it is difficult to have confidence in it; we do not know how representative it is. This is a basic issue in any form of academic research. In this respect, the models offered by hyland (2005) and Ädel (2006) are admirable in presenting inventories of the metadiscourse items used in their searches.»

»References

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»Ädel, A., & A. Mauranen (2010). “Metadiscourse: Diverse and divided perspectives”. Nordic Journal of English Studies 9(2): 1-11. URL: http://ojs.ub. gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/issue/current [17/January/2015].

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