Metadiscourse: Constructing Heteroglossia Interaction In English And Chinese People Comment

Metadiscourse refers to the self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting writers to express viewpoints and engage with readers as members of a particular community. Most scholars abroad or in China have mainly applied metadiscourse to pedagogical researches or discourse analyses. They carry out quantitative analysis of metadiscourse in argumentations or expository writings to discuss its textual and interpersonal meaning or its pragmatic and rhetorical effects from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics and rhetoric. But at the level of discourse semantics, the studies on metadiscourse in other writing styles are seldom involved. People Comment is a type of genre that is the integration of description, narration and argumentation.Under the theoretical framework of Martin's Engagement Subsystem, this thesis aims at analyzing the heteroglossia interaction constructed by metadiscourse in accordance with Hyland and Tse's (2004) classification model in English and Chinese People Comment.This thesis selects 50 English and Chinese articles respectively from the Comment Column of Times Online and the electronic version of Southern People Weekly (《南方人物周刊》) to do quantitative and qualitative analysis of metadiscourse. First, the findings present that interactive metadiscourse show greater proportion than interactional metadiscourse both in English and Chinese, but interactive and interactional metadiscourse indicate higher frequency in English than in Chinese; and also there exist discrepancies in the distribution of each subcategory, among which the proportion of code glosses and evidentials show great differences, besides self-mention and endophoric markers are absent in English; while the proportion of other subcategories display similarities.Then, in line with one parameter of Engagement System—intra- / extra-vocalization, the study examines the categories of metadiscourse invoking intra- / extra-vocalization, presenting that evidentials and code glosses indicating good names or nicknames invoke extra-vocalization while the rest types of metadiscourse invoke intra-vocalization. Besides due to different frequency of each subcategory of metadiscourse, intra-vocalization overwhelms extra-vocalization both in English and Chinese. But by comparison, the frequency of intra-vocalization in English is much higher than it in Chinese; while the frequency of extra-vocalization in English is a little lower than it in Chinese.Finally, based on the other parameter of Engagement System—dialogic expansion or contraction, this thesis analyzes the construction of heteroglossia interaction, which indicates that neutral evidentials, hedges and engagement markers open up dialogic space; authorial evidentials, code glosses indicating good names or nicknames, boosters, concessive relational transitions and attitude markers close down dialogic space; and the rest types of metadiscourse guide dialogue. Moreover, because the distribution of metadiscourse is linked to the norms of cultures and languages, more dialogic expansion resources are employed in Chinese than in English.This thesis provides a tentative model for the application of metadiscourse to discourse analysis, which helps us to understand the characteristic of heteroglossia interaction in People Comment.