A Diachronic Study Of The Use Of Metadiscourse In China Daily Editorials

Editorials, as a special kind of news commentary, aim to comment on current events andissues and guide the perception of the public. It usually stands for a newspaper’s official positionwith relative formality and seriousness. Editorials consist of two interpersonal aims: evaluatingcertain events and convincing readers. Metadiscourse, discourse about discourse, one of thefocuses of discourse analysis, is used exactly to accomplish these goals.The term metadiscourse was first put forward by Zellig Harris in1959to offer a way ofunderstanding language in use. As a necessary discourse marker in a text, it helps writers orspeakers to construct a logical and coherent text with its textual functions and involve the readersor listeners into a successful communicative interpersonal relationship with its interpersonalfunctions. It started to draw extensive attention in the field of Applied Linguistics in the1980s.Later, a systemic study of metadiscourse in discourse analysis appeared. Nowadays thislinguistic phenomenon has been an academic research hot spot and gained more and moreattention and followers.Many scholars (Schiffrin,1980; Crismore and Farnsworth,1989; Hyland,2008; etc.) havedone valuable studies on metadiscourse from different points of view. While for the experts,editorials belong to a relatively special genre, and fewer researches about the application ofmetadiscourse in editorials have been developed. This thesis tries to develop a diachronic studyof the use of metadiscourse in the selected China Daily editorials in the year of1982,1992,2002and2012to see if there are any similarities or differences and the possible reasons. The authoraims to find out the similarities and differences of the use of metadiscourse in China Dailyeditorials during the past three decades, summarizing the typical features of the use ofmetadiscoursal markers in Chinese English-newspaper’s editorials and contributing to the futureapplication of metadiscourse.This study mainly tries to answer the following research questions:(1) What are the featuresof the employment of metadiscourse in China Daily English editorials respectively in1982,1992,2002, and2012?(2) Are there any changes of the employment of metadiscourse in China DailyEnglish editorials during the last three decades? If yes, what are they?(3) What are the possiblereasons of the changes or the maintaining of the employment of metadiscourse in China DailyEnglish editorials during the last three decades? The author firstly analyzes the frequency (per1,000) and proportion of different subtypes of metadiscourse, based on the classification ofmetadiscourse summed up from Hyland (2008) and Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei (2013), respectivelyin1982,1992,2002and2012by quantitative method; and then summarizes the similarities anddifferences among the four years’ samples with a comparison; and in the end explores the possible reasons of these similarities and differences through qualitative method.According to the data analysis of the selected samples, the present study shows that thereare both similarities and differences in the four years’ samples. In general, on one hand, for thesimilarities, metadiscourse are adopted in all the selected editorials in the four years; thefrequency and proportion of the Interpersonal Metadiscourse is higher than the TextualMetadiscourse; on the other hand, for the changes, the frequency of the metadiscourse used inthe selected editorials becomes higher and higher and the Interpersonal Metadiscourse alsoaccounts for an overall higher and higher frequency.This thesis explores the use of metadiscourse in English editorials from ChineseEnglish-newspapers and its variation tendency through a diachronic analysis, and tries tocontribute a little to the future study of metadiscourse in China especially in editorials of ChineseEnglish-newspapers.