An Analysis Of Metadiscourse In Ellen Talk Show From The Perspective Of Phraseology Theory

As a foreign day talk show,Ellen Talk Show tops the list among the foreign programs.Metadiscourse in talk show refers to those different kinds of markers employed by the speaker to organize the statements,and indicate the implication of the speaker.Hyland(2005a)thinks all the metadiscourse has interpersonal function,so he reclassifies the metadiscourse based on the previous studies into interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse.The present study adopted Hyland's(2005a)classifications.Although metadiscourse has attracted the interests of researchers of different fields at home and abroad,most studies are mainly from the perspective of social-communicative,functional,cognitive,rhetorical and teaching practice.Few of them analyze the metadiscourse combining with the phraseology theory.Sinclair(2004)says that the meaning of the discourse need to be expressed in the form of phrase.Thus this paper will analyze the interpersonal functions of metadiscourse in the discourse of host and guests in the Talk Show from the perspective of phraseology theory.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse in Ellen Talk Show?(2)What typical phraseological items of metadiscourse can be evidenced in Ellen Talk Show?(3)How do metadiscourse achieve its interpersonal function in Ellen Talk Show? What are their co-occurrent phrases patterns?In the present study,189 transcriptions of topics in Ellen Talk Show from January to November in 2016 were collected and then built a corpus.Based on the phraseology theory,the frequencies,distributions and typical phraseological items of metadiscourse were analyzed in order to know how metadiscourse achieved its interpersonal function in Ellen Talk Show.The results show that:(1)203 types of metadiscourse are used in the corpus,of which interactional metadiscourse is adopted more frequently than interactive metadiscourse.The stance features rank first;evidentials are the least used in the corpus;there is no endophoric markers and the personal asides(personal asides is one subcategory of engagement markers).(2)In this corpus,47 groups of high frequent meta-discourse phraseological items can be found,covering different types of metadiscourse subcategories,such as engagement markers: you + verb;transitions: and +pronoun/ adverb;self mentions: I + verb / I + conjunctions and so on.(3)The interpersonal function of metadiscourse is reflected by the attitude of the speaker.The reason is that evidentials and the frame markers can enhance the persuasiveness of the discourse.Transitions and selfmentions are used to make assumptions,establish and improve relationship between speakers and listeners,achieving interpersonal functions.Moreover,their co-occurrent phraseological patterns are analyzed in details to show the common phrase patterns which are used to realize the interpersonal function.The present study makes an exploration on metadiscourse in theory,summarizing the meanings,forms and interpersonal functions of the metadiscourse.Practically,it also provides some implications for English writing,namely,the layout of the whole framework and the elaboration of the argument.