The Pragmatics Of Metadiscourse In Academic Lectures: An Adaptation-Relevance Approach

Metadiscourse, an intuitively attractive concept, is often defined as the language we use to show readers how to read, react to, and evaluate what was written about the subject matter. It had been one of the hot topics in discourse analysis, pragmatic studies, and many other research fields even before the coinage of the term"metadiscourse"by Harris in 1959.So far, however, few studies on metadiscourse are pragmatic theory-driven, thus failing to offer a satisfactory account for why metadiscourse is used and how they work in utterance production as well as in utterance interpretation. And less consideration, in particular, is given to the internal mechanisms underlying the occurrence and the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures. Some baffling but significant questions still await an answer, for example:1) Is metadiscourse pervasive in academic lectures?2) Can the occurrence of metadiscourse in academic lectures be accounted for in the enriched Adaptation-Relevance Framework so as to advance our understanding of it? And if so, how can its occurrence be illustrated from this perspective?3) What is the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures? Does it only function to facilitate our interpretation of lecture information?4) Does this study have any pedagogical implications? And what are they?Thus it is the goal of the present study to make a qualitative analysis of the occurrence and the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures within the framework of the enriched Adaptation-Relevance Model.Our analysis suggests that lecturers tend to search for relevance and make adaptations to choose the appropriate metadiscourse device while giving academic lectures. As a dynamic process, contextual adaptations of metadiscourse may be constrained by a variety of factors, such as linguistic reality, social conventions, audience's psychological motivation, etc. Meanwhile, the process of searching for relevance of metadiscourse could be measured in terms of three pairs of distinctions, namely, contextual effect/processing effort, explicit/implicit, conceptual/procedural.Our analysis within the framework of the enriched Adaptation-Relevance Model suggests that these two aspects could be integrated and a certain metadiscourse chosen is the result of searching for relevance and making adaptations. Besides, it is proposed in the study that the lecturer tends to employ metadiscourse as communicative strategies to achieve both the effective illustration of academic information and successful communication between the lecturer and the audience.In addition, the present study has revisited the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures within the framework of the enriched Adaptation-Relevance Model, based on a brief review of traditional opinions on the role of metadiscourse. As a result, the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures could be regarded as the"discourse constructor"through searching for relevance and making adaptations on the part of the lecturer. And the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures is not a passive"discourse facilitator", but an active"discourse constructor".The significance of the current study lies in the fact that it has enhanced our understanding of the mechanism underlying the occurrence and the role of metadiscourse in academic lectures. In addition to the theoretical aspect, the present study also explores its pedagogical implications.