The Study Of Metadiscourse In The 2008 American Presidential Election Debates From Adaptation Theory

As a common linguistic phenomenon, metadiscourse refers to"aspects of a text which explicitly organize the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer's attitude"[1]P108 That is, metadiscourse is"discourse about discourse". According to Crismore[2]P40, discourse can be divided into primary discourse and metadiscourse. The former shows propositional meaning and the latter evaluates the propositional content. Metadiscourse plays important roles in the following two aspects: on one hand, it connects the words, phrases and sentences together, and makes the discourse clear and coherent; on the other hand, it delivers, interprets and evaluates the propositional content, and finally convinces the reader.Since the term"metadiscourse"was coined by Harris in 1959, it has become the hot focus in the field of linguistics. In recent years, more and more linguists have realized the importance of metadiscourse and showed great interest in it: some researchers study the importance of metadiscourse in different genres, such as academic writings, pharmaceutical packaging inserts, cover letters, and newspaper reports, etc, however, few of them make research of metadiscourse in the genre of presidential debates; in addition, many researchers study metadiscourse from different theoretical perspectives, such as communicative, sociolinguistic, psychological, functional, cognitive, and rhetorical perspectives, while few of them use Adaptation Theory as the theoretical perspective to analyze metadiscourse. Actually, Adaptation Theory has very strong explanatory power over the use of metadiscourse. In the present study, the author analyzes the use of metadiscourse in the 2008 American presidential election debates (APEDs). It is hoped that the present research can not only enrich and expand the field of metadiscourse study, but also help people gain a better understanding of Adaptation Theory, at the same time offers important implications for school English debates.There are six chapters in the thesis: chapter 1 is introduction, which describes the background and research questions, aims and significance, data and methodology, and organization of the thesis; chapter 2 is an overview of studies on metadiscourse, which introduces the definitions, classifications, and the previous studies on metadiscourse; chapter 3 is the theoretical framework. It introduces Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, including three notions and four angles of investigation; chapter 4 and 5 are the main parts of the thesis. In chapter 4, the author employs Hyland's classification of metadiscourse to count the number and frequency of metadiscourse. Through the statistic analysis, it is found that in the three presidential debates metadiscourse is commonly used by the debaters, and the frequency of the ten kinds of metadiscourse is different from each other; in chapter 5, the author uses Adaptation Theory to analyze the use of metadiscourse. According to Adaptation Theory, in the presidential debates, the process of using metadiscourse is the process of making linguistic choices by debaters to adapt to different contexts. Therefore, the use of metadiscourse is not only the result of linguistic choices of debaters, but also the means of linguistic adaptation made of the debaters, and adaption is the core; chapter 6 is the conclusion, which summarizes the main findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for future study.