| Popular science,as a medium that connects science and society,is an important way to promote citizen’s literacy.Science popularization has two major ways: the traditional way and the new media way.Metadiscourse,as a linguistic strategy,is very helpful in improving discourse comprehension and relationship construction.Metadiscourse in popular science discourse makes great difference on the effectiveness of science popularization.However,there are few researches focusing on difference of metadiscourse in traditional popular science discourse and new media popular science discourse.As a matter of fact,differences of metadiscourse in different forms of popular science discourse reveal different construction of traditional and new media popular science discourse.They also reveal a writer’s different anticipation to his readers,different positioning to himself and different sense of responsibility to society.Differences in several aspects provide readers with guidance on selection of popular science discourse and make readers comprehend discourse better,which makes the task of science popularization more effective.Therefore,this thesis starts from a metadiscoursal perspective to study similarities and differences of metadiscourse and the way how writers organize discourses and construct interactions in the two types of popular science discourses.This thesis analyzes distribution of metadiscourse using Hyland’s(2005)lexical metadiscourse model and Krumpf’s(2000)visual metadiscourse model.The data of traditional popular science discourse comes from authoritative English popular science magazines and websites;the data of new media popular science discourse comes from the typical English social media application: Instagram.The author collects 100 representative popular science texts and randomly selects 40(20 traditional and 20 new media)from them to do a corpus-based analysis.According to the distribution of metadiscourse in the two types of popular sciencediscourse,the thesis finds out similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse and the potential factors that influence its use.The results show: 1.both traditional and new media popular science discourses use a large number of metadiscourses and new media popular science discourses use more metadiscourses than traditional ones.2.From the lexical aspect,the frequency of interactive metadiscourse is higher than the frequency of interactional metadiscourse in both types of discourse.Among all the subcategories of metadiscourse,the frequency of transition is the highest.However,the frequency of interactive metadiscourse in traditional popular science discourses is higher than that of new media discourses and the frequency of interactional metadiscourse in new media popular science discourses is higher than that of traditional discourses.It proves that for both traditional and new media popular science discourses,their original purpose is to make readers understand and accept science,but their emphases are not the same.Traditional popular science discourses emphasize more authority and credibility of contents while new media popular science discourses focus more on expressions of attitude and interactions with readers.3.From the visual aspect,traditional popular science discourses have more advantages in first impression,external skeleton,chunking,attraction and style.But because of the contemporary readers’ fragmentary reading habits,the small heft of new media popular science discourses still retains some of its advantages.4.The factors that influence metadiscourse use mainly exist in two aspects: linguistic aspect and social aspect.The linguistic factors include cohesion and coherence,fuzziness and subjectivity;the social factors include audience,medium and social responsibility.Some implications are obtained from the above findings: 1.Studies of metadiscourse can be started from the contrastive perspective of traditional and new media discourses to contrast metadiscourse use of the same type of discourse in different media.2.The combined lexical and visual metadiscourse model canalso be used to analyze metadiscourse in other types of discourse besides the popular science discourse.3.Studies of metadiscourse in popular science discourses can not only improve popularizers’ writing skills and popularizing efficiency but also enforce the public’s understanding of popular science discourses:they help readers know writers’ intentions and writing strategies better so that they can comprehend discourses more thoroughly.This study also provides some inspirations for Chinese popular science discourses. |
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