A Pragmatic Study On Metadiscourse In English Political Speeches

Metadiscourse, as a relatively new concept in discourse analysis, has received increasingly interest in recent years. Recent studies have proved its importance in a range of genres and settings. It plays a vital role in organizing the discourse and engaging the audience. However, most of the studies focused mostly on written discourses, especially on practical genres such as school texts and academic articles. Political speech, as a subgenre of public speaking, is of almost no concern of current researches:This paper, based on the metadiscourse schema modified from previous classifications, which distinguish textual and interpersonal types and further subcategories, takes a pragmatic study on the use of metadiscourse in English political speeches. The overall objective is to find out the rules of metadisocurse use in English political speeches and its pragmatic functions, and see what factors have influence on them. The following questions are addressed in this study: What are the gross features of the use of metadiscourse in English political speeches? Are there any differences or similarities in the use of metadisourse in the four subgenres of English political speeches? And what are they? What are the pragmatic implications of metadiscourse use in English political speeches? What factors affect or determine the use of metadiscourse in English political speeches?In order to answer these questions, twenty political speeches from English speaking countries have been chosen as the corpus for this study. The corpus is composed of four subtypes: domestic, military, inaugural, and diplomatic speeches-five pieces from each. The actual analysis of the corpus consists of several steps. First, the metadiscourse items are carefully coded according to the schema. Second, the occurrences of each metadisocurse subcategory in each subtype are counted. Third, the data are processed by calculating the gross totals of metadiscourse items, the total number- of items in each category and subcatergory, the item number per 1000 words, and also, its percentage of total metadiscourse. Finally, statistical findings are presented.Distinct features of metadiscourse have emerged from the study. It has been found that the interpersonal metadiscourse has an evidently preponderance over the textual ones. Among all the metadiscourse subcategories, person markers, logical connectives and hedges are the ones appearing most frequently. From the statistics, many similarities and differences are found across the four subtypes. The proportions of each category and subcategory have generally similar distributions and some differences in the four types of speeches. But the inaugural and domestic speeches employ more metadiscourse devices than the others, and the military ones depend least on them.Regarding the factors leading to these features, the paper argued that metadiscourse use is genre-constrained and context-dependent. Which metadiscourse devices to use and how frequently they are used are influenced by the occasions on which political speeches are made, the purposes the speakers bear in mind and the relationship between the speaker and the audience, namely, the context of situation.Finally, the paper summaries the study and offers prospects for further research.