Interpersonal Functions Of Metadiscursive Nouns In English Linguistic Academic Writings

A large quantity of research over recent two to three decades has been concerned with the linguistic issues of academic writing.Scholars focused either on language features with pedagogical significance or on the ways of interaction between writer(s)and readers.This research trend has given us insights into how,besides producing knowledge,academic writers present arguments,communicate with readers,and fulfill social interaction in academic writing.Theoretical writers do not merely produce texts that discuss a common interest in certain aspects of the world,but use language to acknowledge,construct and negotiate social relations.Quite a few investigations were conducted by a handful of scholars from the perspective of nouns in the past two or three decades to study the authors’ various methods of stepping into texts to organize discourse flow.However,there is not much comparative research relating to interpersonal roles of metadiscursive nouns so for.The thesis adopted the theory of metadiscursive nouns proposed by Jiang(2017,2019)aiming at comparing the interpersonal roles of metadiscursive nouns with quantitative and qualitative research methods between Chinese writers and indigenous English writers.Eighty academic research articles were carefully selected from the internationally renowned journals within the linguistic field in the latest five years.The study was based on two self-built corpora with tokens of 307,938 and 314,567,respectively,with the hope to uncover the different practices of metadiscursive nouns between the two groups of writers when they engage in and interact with readers in academic prose and help Chinese novice writers master proper forms of nouns in academic writing in the future.The research procedures were as follows: Firstly,Ant Conc 3.5.8 was employed to retrieve metadiscursive nouns,and the frequencies were hence drawn;Secondly,the occurrences of metadiscursive nouns were compared to uncover the similarities and differences between native English writers and Chinese writers.Thirdly,the ways of practicing the metadiscursive nouns by different groups of writers were illustrated.Lastly,the reasons behind the similarities and differences were carefully discussed.There are three significant findings in this study.(1)It can be concluded that metadiscursive nouns are widely pervasive in English linguistic academic writings.However,metadiscursive nouns distribute unevenly in the five lexico-grammatical patterns in the corpora,with the determiner + N pattern appearing the most frequently and the determiner + be + N the least.(2)There are some similarities concerning the realization of metadiscursive nouns between native English writers and Chinese writers: a)Both native English writers and Chinese writers are inclined to employ metadiscursive nouns as interpersonal interaction strategy in their articles;b)The two corpora are consistent in the fact that metadiscursive nouns are not evenly used with the five lexico-grammatical patterns;c)In the interactive dimension,both corpora retrieved overwhelming frequency of anaphoric employment of metadiscursive nouns over cataphoric uses,with only 2.5 cases in CANW and 3.3 ones in CACW every 10,000 words within the determiner + N pattern;d)In the interactional dimension,the conclusion can be drawn from the findings that the frequency of stance expression is much higher than that of engagement in both groups of writers.(3)Distinctive differences do exist between the two groups of writers employing metadiscursive nouns: a)It is found that native English writers are more inclined to use the determiner + N pattern than their Chinese counterparts,while native English writers are more interested in employing a more complicated syntactical structure,the determiner + be + N pattern than Chinese linguists;b)It is also discovered that Chinese writers tend to use more entity nouns than native English writers while native English writers prefer to use more attribute and relation nouns in their articles;c)In the interactive dimension,Chinese writers employed more metadiscursive nouns through N to-infinitive clause than native English writers,whereas native English writers apply more discursive nouns in the N that clause;d)In the interactional dimension,Chinese writers are more eager to express stance than native English writers.This research has discovered the characteristics,similarities and differences between native English language authors and Chinese writers using metadiscurisve nouns in interpersonal interaction.Meanwhile,the investigation provides significant inspirations for ESP classes,particularly the academic writing classes in China.