A Corpus-Based Study Of The Functions Of Metadiscursive Nouns In English MA Theses

Metadiscursive noun(hereinafter refer to MNs)is a kind of abstract noun with the characteristic of semantic abstraction and indefiniteness(Jiang & Hyland 2017).The common MNs are idea,thinking,opinion,suggestion and finding,etc.At present,many scholars have found that MNs play an important role in the logical coherence of language texts.The number of use of MNs is closely related to the the overall quality of writing(e.g.,Flowerdew 2006;Gray & Cortes 2011;Swales & Feak 2012).Therefore,on the way of academic research and writing,the use of MNs is particularly important,and more and more scholars pay attention to MNs in recent years.This study resorted to a corpus-based study of MNs in theses.Based on Jiang & Hyland’s functional classification(2015;2016),comparing the use of five grammatical structures:determiner + MNs,MNs + complement clause,MNs + be + complement clause,determiner +be +MNs and there be + MNs,and taking determiner + MNs as an example to analyze the interactional and interactive functions of MNs.This study aims to solve the problems as follows:1.What is the distribution of the five patterns in the English MA theses? 2.What are the interactive and interactional functions of determiner+ MNs?When studying the distribution of meta-discourse nouns,we find that there are 5222 examples of determiner+MNs in five grammatical structures proposed by Jiang and Hyland,accounting for 60.5%.So we specifically discuss the function of determiner+MNs in detail.First of all,in the interactive dimension,this paper based on the classification of anaphoric encapsulation and cataphoric prospection.The former could be further divided into three types,i.e.,new nouns,nominalization and repetition proposed by Pan Jiaqian in 2019.The pattern of determiner+MNs was mainly used to make anaphoric encapsulation rather than cataphoric prospection,with a rough ratio of two to one,while new noun was a major means of encapsulating anaphorically.Secondly,in the interactional dimension,the specific analysis is based on the classification of Jiang and Hyland.Through the analysis of some examples,we find that in most cases,MNs are used to distinguish the internal attributes of things,and in terms of frequency of use,cognitive metadiscoursive nouns are most commonly used.This study provides teaching reference for English academic writing.Educators should be committed to enhancing students’ ability to make good use of MNs in thesis writing to clearly express the author’s point of view and make the text more coherent.