Toward A Multi-Dimensional Approach To The Interpersonal-Rhetorical Resources Of English Metadiscourse

In light of Halliday's meta-functions of language and his interpersonal meaning system in the discussion of functional grammar, and based on classical rhetoric's concepts of persuasion and audience, social construction theory on knowledge and knowledge construction, Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, and genre theory with its rhetoric tradition, this dissertation mainly attempts to establish a multi-dimensional approach to the interpersonal-rhetorical resources of English metadiscourse. The aims of this dissertation are to reveal the interpersonal meaning potentials of metadiscourse, to unfold the persuasive power of metadiscourse used for announcing contribution to knowledge, to reflect writer-reader interaction realized by metadiscourse concerned with face saving, and to provide guidelines for explaining how metadiscourse is treated in the research article genre for the purpose of persuasion. With the attempt to offer some useful suggestions for EAP writing instruction in Chinese classrooms, both the universal and culture-specific treatments of metadiscourse in a small corpus of English research articles are examined in this dissertation.This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a statement of the research goals, research methods and scope of the dissertation. In this chapter we state that the present study is based on our understanding of professional academic writing and the deficiency of previous studies on metadiscourse. In this chapter we also identify some important concepts: contrastive EAP rhetoric, academic discourse community and disciplinarily concensused conventions. Chapter Two deals with the prior work on metadiscourse in the past three decades. A review of the previous perspectives on metadiscourse's definitions, functions and classifications shows that most of them are not adequate for explaining how metadiscourse facilitates the writer-reader interaction in academic texts. A review of the previous empirical studies on metadiscourse shows that...