Contrastive Analysis Of Metadiscourse Devices In English And Chinese Pharmaceutical Packaging Inserts: Towards An Explanation

Metadiscourse refers to aspects of a text which explicitly organize the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer's attitude. (Hyland, 1998) Therefore, it is commonly known as"discourse about discourse". Recently, there has been increasing interest in metadiscourse studies, and a range of genres has proved its importance. However, little work has been done on contrastive analysis of the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese and metadiscourse studies on pharmaceutical packaging inserts are relatively scant. While most of the studies on metadiscourse are along pragmatic and/or functional dimension, our contrastive work, apart from generic, pragmatic and functional perspectives, examines socio-cultural constraints on the choices of metadiscourse devices.This paper, based on a metadiscourse schema modified from previous systems of taxonomy of metadiscourse which identifies textual and interpersonal types and further subcategories while taking into account the generic characteristics of pharmaceutical inserts, tries to account for the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts along linguistic, generic, pragmatic and socio-cultural dimensions, and to find out what constrains the use of certain metadiscourse devices in English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts through such contrastive work. To achieve these, we will address the following questions: (1) what are the similarities for English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts in the employment of metadiscourse devices? (2) Why are there such similarities? (3) What are the differences in the employment of metadiscourse devices for the packaging inserts across the two languages? (4) How to account for such differences?To answer the above questions, twenty pharmaceutical inserts are chosen for our corpus study, with 10 English and 10 Chinese. Then our work takes three steps: first, according to our taxonomy of metadiscourse, metadiscourse items are carefully coded in the texts; second, the occurrences of each metadiscourse item are counted in English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts respectively; third, the data are processed by calculating the gross totals of the metadiscourse items, the percentage of each item in the totals of the metadiscourse devices and the item number per 1000 words. Finally, statistical results are presented. Statistical findings suggest that both English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts employ more textual metadiscourse devices than interpersonal items; logical connectives, topicalizers and code glosses are among the top four textual metadiscourse devices; within the interpersonal metadiscourse subcategory, relational markers and hedges are most frequently employed and few personal markers are available in English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts. However, there do exist differences in the employment of metadiscourse devices in pharmaceutical packaging inserts across the two languages: In the textual subcategory, logical connectives and evidentials are far more frequently used in English pharmaceutical packaging inserts than in Chinese ones, while sequencers in Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts tower over those in English ones; in the interpersonal subcategory, far more hedges are available in English pharmaceutical packaging inserts than in Chinese ones, while in Chinese pharmaceutical inserts, relational markers are numerically preponderant in comparison to English ones; in the interpersonal subcategory, no occurrence of emphatics is found in English pharmaceutical packaging inserts, while in the Chinese samples, such occurrences are available, though not so frequent.With such similarities and differences discerned, this paper argues that generic and pragmatic characteristics common of both English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts explain the similarities between English and Chinese texts and points out that generic features constrain on the choices of metadiscourse devices; the differences in the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese pharmaceutical packaging inserts are due to linguistic, pragmatic and socio-cultural reasons across the languages. And linguistic, pragmatic, and socio-cultural differences impose constraints on the choices of certain metadiscourse devices.Finally the paper summarizes the analysis, admits its limitation and offers prospect for further studies.