A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Chinese And American University Presidents’ Welcome Messages

Since Zellig Harris coined the term metadiscourse in 1959, metadiscourse has found its great popularity in the field of discourse analysis and language teaching. As a linguistic phenomenon, not merely does metadiscourse contribute to readers to better grasp the organization of articles in order to better understand the context of articles, but also establishes the interaction between reader and text, and between the reader and the author. Recent years, in particular, have witnessed an exponential growth in the number of studies devoted to its closer investigation--- studies which examine it from a variety of perspectives, in a number of different genres and discourse communities, as a feature especially of written discourse. However, in the review of the studies on metadiscourse, the author found that potential genres, such as university presidents‘ welcome messages have been rarely explored in the previous studies available. In addition, there are few comparative studies on metadiscourse between different languages, especially between English and Chinese.Within the theoretical framework of Hyland‘s(2005) An Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse and Hyland & Tse‘s(2004) three key principles of metadiscourse, this issue needs to be further discussed in the research by virtue of following research questions:Question 1: What metadiscourse resources occur in Chinese and American university presidents‘ welcome messages(UPWMs) respectively? As for the occurrences and frequency of metadiscourse resources, are there any significant differences between Chinese university presidents‘ welcome messages(C-UPWMs) and the American counterparts(A-UPWMs)?Question 2: How do these metadiscourse resources represent interpersonal meaning?Question 3: How do these metadiscourse resources represent textual meaning?To achieve these, this study analyzes 56 university presidents‘ welcome messages(UPWMs), viz. 28 Chinese university presidents‘ welcome messages(C-UPWMs) in Chinese and 28 American counterparts in English(A-UPWMs), extracted from the authoritative websites of universities. The present study examines the general distribution of metadiscourse resources and the linguistic preferences of each metadiscourse item in English and Chinese university presidents‘ welcome messages as well as revealing the similarities and differences between the two corpora. In addition, this thesis also attempts to explain how metadiscourse resources represent interpersonal meaning and textual meaning from the perspective of Halliday‘s systemic functional linguistics(SFL).Statistical results indicate that metadiscourse resources are ubiquitous both in Chinese and American UPWMs. There are significant differences of interactive and interactional resources in C-UPWMs corpus, as well as in A-UPWMs corpus. With the help of Liang et al‘s Chi-square calculator(Liang et al., 2010), significant differences of the entire metadiscourse resources, interactive and interactional resources as well as some subcategories of metadiscourse resources between A-UPWMs and C-UPWMs corpus are also found. Moreover, further study finds that metadiscourse resources can represent interpersonal meaning and textual meaning, which boasts both great theoretical and practical significance for metadiscourse studies and practical use.