A Corpus-based Study Of Metadiscursive Nouns In Academic Articles Across Disciplines

Traditional studies treat academic discourse as a carrier of knowledge(arguments or beliefs)and a static process of achievement presentation;however,the interpersonal semantic function also plays a crucial role in academic prose,which is a dynamic process of establishing efficacious interaction between writers and readers.The most direct manifestation of this process is a writer’s intervention into academic text in order to realize textual cohesion and express opinions.The academics have examined various ways in which an author participates in the text by means of adverbs,adjectives,modal verbs,nouns and so on;however,the studies concerned with the nominal resources primarily concentrate on cohesive roles,but pay little attention to the interpersonal functions.Additionally,few of the scholars focus on the relationship between noun with grammatical constructions and author’s stance options.In the view of the research status that lacks of a comprehensive research framework of these nouns,Jiang & Hyland(2016)put forward the term “metadiscursive noun” and an integrated research model in their articles “Nouns and academic interactions: a neglected feature of metadiscourse”.According to their expatiation,not only is the metadiscursive noun a resource to organize textual structure,but also an indispensable means to achieve textual coherence and construct interpersonal connection.The metadiscursive nouns discussed in the fourth chapter “Results and Discussion” appear in the grammatical pattern “N + post-nominal clause”(post-nominal clause: that clause,to do clause,of doing clause and preposition wh-clause).This study,on the basis of self-built corpora with multi-disciplinary research articles,aims to explore the metadiscursive nouns in humanities and social sciences as well as science and engineering.The contrastive research can be undertaken based on the following questions:(1)What are the frequencies of metadiscursive nouns in the RASE corpus and RALA corpus respectively?(2)What are the rhetorical features(interactive and interactional features)of metadiscursive nouns in corpora?(3)What are the distributions of sub-constructions of “N + post-nominal clause” in corpora? And what are the relationships between lexico-grammatical constructions and authors’ stance options? To answer the three questions,the corpora(RASE Corpus and RALA Corpus)have been built which consist of six disciplines(education,applied linguistics,sociology,cell biology,computer science and technology and electronic engineering).Moreover,this thesis adopts Jiang & Hyland’s(2016,2017)analytic framework about the rhetorical features of metadiscursive nouns as theoretical background to investigate the use of such nouns in humanities and social sciences as well as science and engineering(interdisciplinary variations).Answering the three questions above:(1)Academic writers in the soft domains make more use of metadiscursive nouns than their peers in the hard domains,and this can be explained from the perspective of author themselves,disciplinary characteristics and anticipated readers.(2)With regard to interactive dimension,72% of cataphoric reference of metadiscursive nouns occur in the soft sciences to organize text structure,speculate the following propositional information and facilitate readers’ understanding.Interactional dimension is employed for stance expression.Academic writers in soft disciplines more frequently employ manner nouns,event nouns and cognitive nouns,whereas the hard writers apply more event nouns and manner nouns.Furthermore,there exist significant discrepancies pertaining to the other expressive categories in the soft and hard sciences,which indicates that disciplinary variations and stance options are correlated.(3)“MN + to-inf.clause” repeatedly appear in the corpora and co-occurs with event nouns and manner nouns to define and evaluate entities.Through exploring the rhetorical strategies of metadiscursive nouns that play important roles in structural configuration and evaluation expression,this study verifies Hyland’s(2005)metadiscourse model and Jiang & Hyland’s(2016;2017)research mode of metadiscursive nouns.Furthermore,this thesis enriches interpersonal studies of abstract nouns and provide instructions and inspirations for EAP teaching and learning.