Interactional Metadiscourse And Positioning In Academic Speech

According to social constructionism,communication reveals speakers'identities which are not statically but dynamically constructed in concordance with context.Metadiscourse,the linguistic expression which demonstrates self-reflexivity and interaction,can help speakers construct discourses,guide listeners to deconstruct discourses and indicate interactional speaker-listener relation.For a long time,scholars have mainly conducted studies on how writers shape their identities through metadiscourse in written discourses.Nevertheless,there is a paucity of exploration into how different academic communities position themselves through metadiscourse in speech.This study selects files on doctoral thesis defenses from the corpus of English as an Academic Lingua Franca(ELFA)as research corpus,intending to examine the overall features of interactional metadiscourse in thesis defenses,to summarize similarities and differences of interactional metadiscourse in the experts' and candidates' speech and their positioning preference.This study initially revises Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse and the stance and engagement system,dividing interactional metadiscourse into main categories and sub-categories.Then,built on the theory of communities of practice,experts and candidates are treated as two academic communities.Based on meta-information in files,it extracts experts' and candidates' speech respectively by the Sub-corpus Creator to construct two sub-corpora.Afterwards,BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.1 is applied for automatic annotation and manual annotation,AntConc 3.2.4 for searching items and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator for comparing statistical distinction.Lastly,textual analysis is conducted to reveal positioning tendencies.Findings are as follows:(1)there are substantial items of interactional metadiscourse in thesis defenses and more stance markers but less engagement markers are observed.The rank of stance markers is self-mentions,hedges,boosters and attitude markers and that of engagement markers is listener pronouns,directives,questions and knowledge reference;(2)there is no statistical difference in hedges,boosters and knowledge reference in experts' and candidates' speech.Nevertheless,experts adopt more cases of interactional metadiscourse.To be specific,experts employ more engagement markers but less stance markers.In terms of the sub-categories,experts employ more cases of attitude markers,listener pronouns,questions and directives while candidates use more self-mentions;(3)statistical and textual distinctions indicate that candidates display a self-positioning tendency while experts demonstrate other-positioning tendency.The tentative application of positioning theory in interactional metadiscourse provides new explanatory framework for the research on metadiscourse.Focus on different communities' employment of interactional metadiscourse and the positioning tendency extends the research scope.And the combination of corpus-based automatic annotation and manual annotation and the merger of automatic search and manual check enlighten feasible methods for exploring metadiscourse based on big data.Finally,it contributes to understanding the dialogical model of academic speech and providing suggestions for non-native speakers of English to effectively defend themselves in ELFA communication.