«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 | Universitat Jaume I | Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales | Departamento de Estudios Ingleses | Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE) | Castellón | ESPAÑA


Extracto de apartados en páginas 31-32 («Conclusion») y 25-31 («Metadiscourse and signalling nouns» y «Signalling nouns and metadiscourse») del artículo en PDF. Véanse en la publicación original del artículo completo las referencias correspondientes a los autores que se citan en el extracto a continuación.

«In this article I have reviewed a selection of models of metadiscourse and have discussed a number of important issues in metadiscourse theory: metadiscourse as interpersonal or textual; the size of the linguistic unit in metadiscourse research; the multi-functionality of metadiscourse items; and the issue of representativeness in corpus-based approaches to metadiscourse. I have then introduced the notion of SN, showing how the theory has been developed. Finally, I have argued that SNs represent an important resource for communicating intended meaning, i.e. that SNs are metadiscoursal, and that the category might be incorporated into models of metadiscourse.

»In my introduction, I situated this article in the context of the need to come up with optimal descriptions of genres as a basis for a genre-based pedagogy. This article has identified metadiscourse as an important dimension of such a description and has argued that SNs should be a part of such a description. metadiscourse, and within that SNs, can easily be introduced into a consciousness-raising model of genre-based pedagogy (Swales, 1990), where students can be invited to interpret, produce and critique their use (Pérez-Llantada, 2006: 82). Such an approach can make learners aware of how metadiscursive patterns in the text can help to decipher the author’s intended message, can show how authors can guide readers/listeners to intended meanings and can indicate how a text hangs together, or coheres. At the same time, in terms of production, such an approach can empower learners to go beyond propositional meaning, introducing them to ways to make their intended meanings clear and signpost to their readers/listeners how to proceed through the text.

»[...]

»Metadiscourse and signalling nouns

»Having reviewed some models of metadiscourse and considered some theoretical issues, as indicated in my introduction, I will now consider the notion of SN and how this category might fit into a model of metadiscourse.

»The notion of signalling noun

»The notion of SN has its origins in work by Winter (1977). Winter identified three types of vocabulary which are important in establishing relations between clauses: type 1 consists of subordinators such as “although”, “except”, “unless”, and “whereas”; type 2 is made up of sentence connectors such as “as a result”, “however”, “indeed”, and “therefore”; and type 3 is made up of open class items [NOTA 3]— nouns, verbs and adjectives — that have the potential to connect clauses in a similar way to the type 1 and type 2 items.

»It is the nouns in this group that provided the inspiration for the notion of SNs (see also work by e.g. Francis, 1986, 1994; Ivanič, 1991; and Schmid, 2001, among others for similar work).

»Although I will focus on SNs here, I may mention briefly that the other parts of speech (type 1 and type 2 vocabulary) have the potential of contributing towards metadiscourse. For example, Winter’s type 1 and type 2 items correspond to hyland’s “transition markers” category of interactive resources, or stance markers (hyland, 2005: 49) [NOTA 4].

»SNs are abstract nouns like “fact”, “idea”, “possibility”, “problem”, and “result” which are non-specific in their meaning when considered in isolation and specific in their meaning by reference to their linguistic context.

»The following are some examples in the context of the clause or nominal group:

»(1) the fact is that we’ve all eaten genetically-modified crops

»(2) the hypothesis that the chemical beginnings of life can occur in atmospheres that are only mildly reducing

»(3) the point is not to go through all the steps

»(4) the possibility of curing sexual psychopaths

»(5) the situation where you’ve had to make a choice between two things

»In each of these examples, the SN (in bold) is realized, or specified, in the text which is underlined. SN specifics may also be found not in the same clause or nominal group as the SN, but in adjoining clauses, sentences, or even longer stretches of text, as exemplified in the following examples, where it is to be noted that the realization may either precede or follow the SN:

»(6) This geometry is probably favored because the trans configuration leaves a vacant low-ENERgY orbital that can be occupied by the two d electrons. According to this explanation…

»(7) Several factors have led price to become a more important component of marketing strategy. First, economic dislocations in the late 1970s and early 1980s made consumers more price-sensitive. Second, competition from lower-priced foreign imports has led American firms either to try to compete on a price basis, or to escape price competition by going after high-price segments. Third, companies have realized the benefits of segmenting markets by price and are offering high-, medium-, and lowpriced brands in a product line. Finally, deregulation in many industries has led to greater price competition, increasing the importance of price.

»It is important to note that SN is a functional notion, not a formal one. Abstract nouns have the potential to act as SNs, but they are only counted as SNs if they are realized in the surrounding text, as in the above examples.

»Although unspecific in meaning in isolation, an SN nevertheless indicates how the piece of discourse to which it refers (referred to as its specifics, or its realization) is to be understood. It is a “fact”; it is a “hypothesis”; it is a “possibility”; it is a “point”, it is a “situation”; it is an “explanation”; it is (several) “factors”.

»The relations between an SN and its specifics are in fact complementary, each affecting the meaning of the other; the SN provides the specific meaning for the SN, but the SN indicates how the specifics are meant to be understood in relation to the surrounding discourse. The important point for the argument of this paper is that the SN performs a metadiscoursal function, in indicating how the stretch of text to which it refers is to be interpreted, whether this be in the same clause or across clauses.

»It may also be noted that SNs perform a textual function in allowing for the distribution of information across and within clauses, although space precludes a discussion of this issue.

»In my research with Richard W. Forest (Flowerdew & Forest, 2015), we have used three sub-corpora of lectures, textbook chapters and journal articles split further into 12 disciplines across the natural and social sciences. The corpus is referred to as the Flowerdew Corpus of Academic English(FCAE) and it consists of approximately 650,000 words. One of the most striking findings in this work is that SNs occur more than twice as frequently in the social sciences as they do in the natural sciences (the split is approximately 70/30). The reason for this is that natural sciences make greater use of technical terms, which reduces the need for SNs.

»The overall average frequency across the whole corpus is one SN per 37 words, an indication of the importance of this category, although there is considerable variation in frequency across disciplines and genres. The total count of different SN types in the FCAE is 845.

»We have classified SNs into six major semantic categories, as follows:

»• acts, which refer to material actions or events, e.g. “application”, “conversion”, “reaction”

»•locutions, which refer to verbal activity, e.g. “declaration”, “question”, “statement”;

»• ideas, which refer to mental phenomena, e.g. “feeling”, “idea”, “thought”;

»• facts, which represent information about the world, “effect”, “result”, “thing”;

»• modal facts, which construe probability, usuality, obligatoriness, inclination, and ability, e.g. “duty”, “possibility”, “probability”;

»• circumstantial facts, which present information in terms of how, when where and why, e.g. “manner”, “period”, “way”.

»Classifying SNs in this way allows us to compare disciplines and genres in terms of these semantic categories. Our findings are fairly consistent in ranking the semantic categories in the following order in terms of frequency, with little variation across genres and disciplines: fact, idea, circumstantial fact, locution, act and modal fact.

»This tells us, in very broad terms, that academic discourse in general is concerned with, first, representing the focus of the discourse as facts; then, with discussing ideas; next, with considering the circumstances of those facts, and ideas; and after that, with presenting the locutions (most probably by others) with regard to those facts. The functions of representing actions or facts about the world in terms of their probability are less frequent than the four others.

»One type of SN which, following, e.g. Francis (1986, 1994) and Ivanič (1991), we refer to as text nouns, nouns which refer to parts of the text, nouns like “section”, “paragraph”, and “paper”, is also worthy of mention with regard to the literature on metadiscourse, given that it is included in metadiscourse taxonomies (e.g. Mauranen, 1993; Hyland, 2005).

»One related feature of SNs that we have discovered in our corpus work is that many words which may function as SNs occur in prefabricated patterns, as adjuncts, e.g. “as a result”, “for example”, “in fact”, “in principle”. We have not counted examples such as these as SNs, because they have become grammaticalised, as adjuncts. Adjuncts such as these would fit into winter’s type 2 vocabulary rather than his type 3. They would also fit into some models of metadiscourse. They perform a similar function to SNs, but are not counted as SNs.

»Signalling nouns and metadiscourse

»Starting with vande Kopple’s metadiscourse category of “illocution marker”, which “make explicit to our readers what speech or discourse act we are performing at certain points in our texts” (page 84), most models of metadiscourse have something similar. hyland’s category “frame marker” refers to “discourse acts” (page 49) and Ädel (2006), has a category “metatext”, which “spells out the writer’s (and/or the reader’s) discourse acts” (page 36).

»In spelling out discourse acts, as should be clear from the above examples, we are in the territory of SNs. While vande Kopple presents only illocutionary verbs as examples of such markers, most such verbs have their nominal counterparts. Thus where vande Kopple gives the examples “hypothesize that”, “to sum up”, “we claim that”, and “I promise to”, we could equally well substitute nominal (SN) versions such as “my hypothesis is that”, “my conclusion is that”, “my claim is that”, or “my promise is that”. Two writers on metadiscourse do include nominal markers.

»They are Ädel, who includes “question”, “definition”, “discussion”, “example”, and “conclusion” as examples of her “metatextual” category of metadiscourse and hyland (2005), who includes the following nominals as frame markers: “aim”, “focus”, “goal”, “intention”, “objective”, and “purpose” (see appendix). Such nominals as these provided as examples by Ädel and Hyland, it should be clear from the above section on SNs, are prime examples of potential SNs. however, Ädel only has five examples of SNs and hyland has just 6, while in the FCAE, as mentioned above, there is a total of 845 different SN types [NOTA 5]. All of these SNs “spell out the writer’s discourse acts” to use Ädel’s terminology (page 36), so a strong case can be made for including them in any model of metadiscourse.

»The reason, I think, why vande Kopple and others focus on illocutionary verbs rather than their nominal counterparts is probably because their approach is primarily theoretical [NOTA 6]. A lot has been written about illocutionary verbs (also referred to as “performatives”), at least since Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), while the literature on what we might refer to as the SN phenomenon has a much lower profile. One interesting model of metadiscourse that I have not reviewed above, but is of interest in this respect, is that of Beauvais (1969). The title of Beauvais’s contribution is “A speech act theory of metadiscourse” and his model takes as its starting point illocutionary verbs. he defines metadiscourse as “illocutionary force indicators that identify expositive illocutionary acts” (page 15).

»Although the starting point is illocutionary verbs and illocutionary acts, which are signalled by such verbs (“expositive illocutionary acts”), Beauvais allows for “secondary expositive illocutionary acts”, which may include nominal counterparts of illocutionary verbs [NOTA 7]. Nevertheless, the default category in Beauvais’s model, which is a theoretical one, not an empirical one, is still the illocutionary verb.

»If we take a corpus-driven approach and look in the FCAE, we find, in fact, that nominal (SN) forms are far more frequent than their verbal counterparts. “I/we hypothesise/hypothesize” does not occur at all in the FCAE (“we hypothesize” occurs once), while “hypothesis/hypotheses” occurs 90 times as an SN in the FCAE [NOTA 8]. Similarly, there are no occurrences of “I/we claim”, while there are 77 instances of “claim” as an SN in the FCAE. To give a third example, there are again no instances of “I/we promise”, while “promise” as an SN occurs 21 times in the FCAE [NOTA 9].

»So the point I want to make in this section is that SN is a category that has been overlooked somewhat in models of metadiscourse and it might be taken into account more seriously in any theoretical or empirical approach to the topic. The question that follows is how would such a model be operationalized in a corpus-based study? Flowerdew and Forest (2015) provide an inventory of all of the SNs in the FCAE and this could form the basis for searching in other academic corpora [NOTA 10]. One would probably not want to use all 845 SN types as search terms, but a selection of the most frequent could make up the inventory.

»In my introduction to the section of this article concerning issues in metadiscourse theory, I said that I would return to these issues in my discussion of SNs, which is what I will now do. So, first, let me turn to the issue of the textual and interpersonal functions. A distinctive feature of SNs is that both of these functions are important for SNs. Insofar as they indicate to the reader/listener what type of meaning to attach to a stretch of text, they can be considered to be interpersonal. But, insofar as they link up parts of a text they at the same time perform a textual function (see Flowerdew, 2003 for more on this). Next, let us consider the size of the unit of analysis. In the above discussion, for a number of reasons which I will not repeat here, I have suggested that smaller items may be better than larger items as the unit of analysis. With SNs, we obviously have a single item unit, so this is an argument in support of this approach. It makes the issue of counting much easier, with each unit being counted only once. Concerning the issue of multi-functionality, because we are dealing here with single-word items, this would seem to be an advantage and less of an issue. Finally, concerning the representativeness issue, if representativeness is the goal, in the 845 items from the FCAE, we have a fairly comprehensive list on which to base searches. however, other academic corpora, representative of other genres and disciplines, might contain other SN types not appearing in the 845 word list and the blind application of the FCAE list might not be appropriate.

»Needless to say, an application of the list to other non-academic corpora would complicate matters further. So this is an issue that needs addressing in any application designed for maximum representativeness. Researchers would need to search their corpus to identify additional SN types. But, of course, they could use the 845 word list as a stop list, which would be likely to cover most of the SN types occurring in the corpus, especially if it was an academic one.

»Space precludes further discussion of how SNs might be operationalized in a model of metadiscourse, but I hope to have given a flavour of how such a procedure might be put into practice.»