A Study Of Metadiscursive Noun Use In English-major Master’s Theses And Doctoral Dissertations

As a special type of linguistic resource,metadiscursive nouns contribute to the realization of discourse cohesion and the establishment of writer-reader interaction.A great deal of effort has been paid to the investigation of the use of metadiscursive nouns,while less has been devoted to the use of metadiscursive nouns in graduate students’ academic writings.The current study investigates the overall features of metadiscursive noun use in English-major graduate students’ writings in comparison with expert writings and probes into the question of whether there are any differences in the use of metadiscursive nouns between master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.Corpora were established to explore the use of metadiscursive nouns in master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted.Quantitative analysis was done to examine the frequency of lexico-grammatical patterns where metadiscursive nouns are applied as well as the interactive and interactional use of metadiscursive nouns.Qualitative analysis was conducted to show how metadiscursive nouns were used in academic writings by analyzing concrete examples in individual sample retrieved from each corpus.Firstly,results reveal that the overall frequency of metadiscursive nouns in student writings is significantly lower than that in expert writings,indicating that students’ awareness and use of metadiscursive nouns in academic writings need to be improved.The use of "N+post-nominal clause","N+be+complement clause",and"determiner+N" patterns in student writings is significantly less than that in expert writings.In terms of using metadiscursive nouns to express interactive functions,both anaphoric and cataphoric use of metadiscursive nouns in student writings are significantly less than in expert writings,which shows that students do not have a good command of the interactive functions of metadiscursive nouns and they cannot make good use of metadiscursive nouns to create textual cohesion.As for the use of metadiscursive nouns to express interactional functions,the frequency of stance and engagement features in expert writings is significantly higher.In expressing authorial stances,the use of entity nouns,text nouns,event nouns,attribute nouns,and status nouns in student writings are significantly lower than that in expert writings,revealing that student writers have not been accustomed to using metadiscursive nouns to show their stances in academic writings and to interact with the readers.Student writers are found to use significantly more relation nouns than expert writers.Secondly,it has been found that the frequency of metadiscursive nouns in master’s theses is significantly higher than that in doctoral dissertations.Master’s students have been found to use the "determiner+N" pattern significantly more than doctoral students.The simplicity of this structure may account for this finding.No significant difference has been found in the number of metadiscursive nouns being used to express interactive functions between master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.In terms of using metadiscursive nouns to express interactional functions,master’s students used the engagement features significantly more than their doctoral counterparts.As regards using metadiscursive nouns to express authorial stances,master’s students employ significantly more text and status metadiscursive nouns than doctoral students but doctoral students employ a wider range of text metadiscursive nouns,demonstrating a richer repertoire of metadiscursive nouns of doctoral students.Doctoral students use significantly more discourse and cognition metadiscursive nouns than master’s students.The current research is of both theoretical and practical significance.It enriches theoretical research on metadiscursive nouns.Practically,this study helps to enhance English-major graduate students’ awareness of using metadiscursive nouns in their academic writings and sheds light on the teaching of metadiscursive nouns in academic English writing courses.