A Study Of Metadiscourse In English Recruitment Advertisements From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Persuasion Theory

As an important medium between employers and job seekers,a recruitment advertisement,highly interactive and persuasive,is mainly used to convey information,persuade job seekers,and reflect the company’s strength.Metadiscourse,a common term in current discourse analysis and language education research,refers to language resources used to construct a coherent discourse,express one’s standpoint,and coordinate relations with the recipient.Motivated by the lack of studies that have explored the application of metadiscourse in recruitment discourse,this study selects 50 English recruitment advertisements released by Fortune 500 companies in English-speaking countries to build the corpus.Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse is adopted as the categorization system for identifying metadiscourse and Aristotle’s rhetorical persuasion theory serves as the framework for further qualitative analysis.Specifically,this study probes into the distributional and linguistic features of metadiscourse in the collected English recruitment advertisements and analyzes how subcategories of metadiscourse are used to achieve persuasive effects through ethos(credibility appeals),pathos(affective appeals),and logos(rational appeals).First,the findings reveal that metadiscourse is prevalent in the collected English recruitment advertisements,and interactional metadiscourse is far more than interactive metadiscourse.This is to serve the two major communicative purposes of recruitment advertisements,namely,publicity and persuasion.Of all metadiscourse markers,self mentions,engagement markers,attitude markers,and boosters are the most frequently used whereas evidentials show a very low presence.Next,in these English recruitment advertisements,three persuasive appeals are involved,among which the affective appeal is the main means of recruiters.To create the affective appeal,employers extensively use engagement markers,attitude markers and self mentions which help mobilize readers’ positive emotions,making job hunters feel respected and valued.The combination of transitions,frame markers and code glosses mainly serves to arrange the discourse in a coherent,intelligible and convincing way,further achieving the rational appeal.In terms of the credible appeal,boosters,hedges and evidentials are conducive to building a credible,trustworthy and polite image to maximize the halo effect on the recruiting company.In addition,the study suggests that the use of metadiscourse slightly varies in recruitment advertisements for different positions.Engagement markers are more adopted in relatively senior positions in an attempt to strike a chord with the qualified talents and express a strong desire for them.And technical positions,due to their professionalism,show a larger proportion of code glosses to describe the job responsibilities.This study explores the distributional pattern of metadiscourse in English job advertisements and analyzes how the effective use of it contributes to maximizing persuasion,expanding the scope of metadiscourse research in the business genre.And it’s hoping to shed some light on the writing of recruitment advertisements,helping recruiters to produce effective and persuasive texts.