A Relevance Approach To Metadiscourse In The American And Chinese University Student Presentations

Metadiscourse is a linguistic form collaborating to the construction of propositions, realizing the interaction between a speech and its speaker, and the interaction between the speaker and the audience. Metadiscourse has been examined extensively in written discourse but so far it has attracted little attention to its presence in spoken discourse, especially in classroom oral discourse. It is meant to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis on metadiscourse in the American and Chinese university student presentations, with the aim of identifying what kind of metadiscourse characterizes this genre and accounting for the occurrence and the role of metadiscourse from the perspective of relevance theory.Referring to Hyland's (2005) classification of metadiscourse, a new type of metadiscourse named delayer marker is added to the category of interactive resource by taking the on-line nature of spoken discourse into consideration. The quantitative analysis suggests that metadiscourse is in common use in both the American and the Chinese university student presentations. The two groups'similarities in metadiscourse use lie in their preferences for transitions, frame markers, delayer markers, hedges, boosters and engagement markers which characterize student presentations. The two groups'differences in metadiscourse use consist in the different frequencies of metadiscourse produced and their different preferences for expressions of the same type of metadiscourse.According to the presumption of optimal relevance, a qualitative analysis of metadiscourse is carried out and it suggests that speakers'motivation for producing metadiscourse is basically determined by speakers'abilities to analyze the audience's need and expectations, together with their preferences which indicate their communicative intentions for searching degree of optimal relevance. In relevance term, the choice of contexts for inferential process in general is determined by a range of assumptions stored in the form of different schemas in people's minds, but the selection of the best possible context out of that range for interpretation in particular is determined by the search for relevance. Specifically, by taking the distinction between conceptual meanings and procedural meanings, and the distinction between explicatures and implicatures into consideration, metadiscourse is examined from two dimensions. Metadiscourse encoding procedural meanings extend the context to guarantee relevance by making it manifest to the audience that the set of assumptions are related to each other in the given context, bringing implicatures into light. Metadiscourse encoding conceptual meanings guarantees relevance by signaling where the schema should be enriched with a higher-level explicature. Moreover, the two groups'preferences for particular types of metadiscourse are mainly determined by the cognitive environment at given time which is basically consisted of speakers'and hearers'language proficiency, their genre knowledge and their knowledge of the topic. Furthermore, the two groups'different preferences for metadiscourse expressions are basically due to the language proficiency and the genre knowledge obtained from training.The study also suggests that metadiscourse works as a discourse constructor on the presenter's part and as an instructor on the audience's part. Through this research, it may improve L2 learners'knowledge of metadiscourse and enhance their metadiscourse awareness in the delivery of presentations.