A Study Of Engagement Markers In Chinese Popular Science Articles

Engagement markers reflect reader involvement in the discourse and are a means of establishing the relationship between writers and readers.Engagement markers reveal the reader-oriented interactive features in the discourse.Numerous studies have shown that the interaction between writers and readers exists in written discourse.Previous research on interactive features in written discourse has focused on academic discourse,including research articles,academic writing and other texts.However,less attention is paid to the genre of popular science articles.Moreover,the writer-oriented features of interaction provide a great deal of evidence that writers’ views,attitudes and ideas are closely linked to the message writers convey.There are relatively few studies on reader-oriented features of interaction.This thesis will focus on the reader-oriented features of Chinese popular science articles.Drawing on Hyland’s(2005a)classification of the forms and functions of engagement markers,this study randomly selects 120 Chinese popular science articles from January to June in 2020 from three We Chat subscription accounts:“kexuedayuan”,“kepubolan” and “Guokr42”,as the corpus.And this study uses Ant Conc3.5.8 to search and count engagement markers in the corpus.This thesis attempts to explore the characteristics of engagement markers in Chinese popular science articles through qualitative and quantitative analysis.The results show that reader pronouns and questions account for a large proportion of engagement markers in Chinese popular science articles.Among them,the forms of first-person pronouns and special questions are used mostly by writers to engage with readers.Questions can achieve the following nine functions in Chinese popular science articles: create interest,frame purpose,organize text,explain scientific knowledge,express evaluation,support claims,suggest research,speak to readers,and express doubts.Directives appear mainly in the forms of imperatives and modals of obligation.Directives perform multiple functions,the use of cognitive acts and textual acts is more than physical acts.By comparison,writers use less personal asides and shared knowledge.This study is expected to provide writing suggestions by analyzing engagement markers in Chinese popular science articles.Writers of Chinese popular science articles can directly invite readers to participate in the articles through reader pronouns,and interact with readers through questions and directives.Moreover,readers can look at pictures,watch videos and click on hyperlinks provided by writers to obtain more relevant information,since pictures,videos and hyperlinks can be added to the We Chat subscription accounts.