| Contrastive rhetoric(CR) sees writing as cultural engagement, and every language or culture has its distinctive writing style and rhetorical pattern. With the development of CR,researchers focus more on the dynamic model of small cultures across different communities. As a cover term for the self-reflective linguistic expressions, metadiscourse has been an important rhetorical strategy and key feature of academic writings in assisting the writer to express the viewpoints and engaging the readers as members of a particular community. Recent years have witnessed explosive empirical studies on metadiscourse employments in journal articles across different languages or disciplines. However, studies scarcely cover metadiscourse use in the post-method sections of postgraduate dissertations written by Chinese advanced students.This paper investigates interactive metadiscourse distribution in a corpus of 100 masters and doctoral dissertations in applied linguistics selected from CNKI(Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) totaling 1.26 million words. The contrastive analysis aims to find out the different use of interactive metadiscourse in the post-method sections, to explore the rhetorical strategies preferred by the two academic communities, and finally to probe into the underlying reasons for the variations.To achieve the above research purposes, the author first proposes an extended analytical framework based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscouse, dividing five categories of interactive metadiscourse into thirteen subcategories. Then, interactive metadiscourse resources are annotated both automatically and manually through BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.1. Next,AntConc 3.5.0 and BFSU Likelihood and Chi-square Calculator 1.0 are employed to calculate the occurrences and frequencies of interactive metadiscourse devices per 10,000 words. Finally,the different use of interactive metadiscourse in masters and doctoral dissertations are compared through detailed textual analysis, and the reasons for these variations are interpreted through a three-dimensional model of intercultural communicative competence.The research findings include the following three aspects: 1. Overall, interactive metadiscourse employments do differ in the post-method sections in masters and doctoral dissertations. 2. Specifically, exemplifiers, topicalizers, integral and non-integral citations are significantly more used by doctoral students to explicate the material, signal writer’s attitudes and commitments as well as claim solidarity with readers, which indicates a more explicit rhetorical preference and a writer-responsible writing style. In contrast, the considerable overuse of sequencers, addition markers, inference markers in masters dissertations leads to a repetitiveand notorious writing style, and the less use of other devices indicates that masters students prefer a more implicit rhetorical strategy, as they tend to express their authorial presence implicitly, leaving much room for the reader to interpret propositions by themselves, thus leads to a reader-responsible writing style. 3. The underlying reasons of these variations lie in the different level of intercultural communicative competence, including the postgraduate writer’s knowledge, the writer’s attitudes to the imagined reader, and the skills of writer-reader interaction.This paper expands the scope of empirical research on metadiscourse use from journal articles to postgraduate dissertations. By comparing differences in interactive metadiscourse employment across two postgraduate communities in applied linguistics, this paper is beneficial for Chinese postgraduates to master basic knowledge of linguistic patterns and rhetorical strategies within particular communities. It also sheds lights on understanding the nature and significance of interactive metadiscourse in producing community-specific, context-based cultural products. |
