Interpersonal Functions Of Metadiscourse In English Academic Book Reviews

Metadiscourse is a linguistic and pragmatic resource employed by writers to adopt a position to refer to and reflect the relationship between the content of the discourse, the writer and the reader. The study of metadiscourse presupposes that writing is a social engagement or interaction. Metadiscourse reveals the presence of the writer in a discourse, which helps the writer guide the reader to understand the discourse in question and indicates the writer's stance toward the subject matter. An interaction is inherently a two-way process involving the writer and the reader. If we ignore any side, either the reader or the writer, the interaction will be less smooth or even break down the interaction. The purpose of this study is to investigate the interpersonal functions of metadiscourse in English academic book reviews.The present study uses Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine how the two types of metadiscourse resources, interactive and interactional are identified in the texts, and how reviewers employ interactive metadscourse and interactional metadiscourse resources respectively to engage in their text and realize the interpersonal functions. This study is based on a corpus of 50 English academic book reviews that come from two journals in the field of English linguistics. The choice of book reviews was motivated by the need to control as much as possible such variables as writers' nationality, levels of experience and expertise, period of publication besides the consideration of disciplines and journals. In order to base the study on a range of representative book reviews, academic book reviews that are written by experts, whose native language is English, were selected from two journals which are of comparable status and are published by international well-known professional disciplinary associations between 2007 and 2009.This corpus-based study consists of both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Data analysis in this study reveals that metadiscourse resources are used frequently in the corpus, demonstrating the universal nature and the important role that metadiscourse plays in the writing of English academic book reviews. It is found that academic book reviewers in this corpus used slightly more interactive metadiscourse than interactional ones, with transitions, hedges and frame markers being the most frequently used metadiscourse resources. The highly frequent use of transitions and frame markers, which represent internal connections in discourse and writers'guidance for readers, is clearly an important feature of academic argument, or specifically academic book reviews. The highly frequent use of hedges reflects the critical importance of distinguishing fact from opinion in academic writing and the need for writers to evaluate their assertions in ways that recognize potential alternative voices.Findings of the qualitative study reveal that in the academic context under study, metadiscourse is the writer's important means of packaging and presenting content, enabling academics to direct the reader throughout the reading process in different ways. With the help of metadiscourse resources, academics can offer a credible representation of themselves in discourse. They can also influence as well as interact with readers by anticipating their likely background knowledge, processing problems and reactions to the text.It is hoped that the study of interpersonal functions of metadiscourse in English academic book reviews will shed some light on how metadiscourse is embedded in academic context in particular and helps maintain a positive interpersonal relationship between the writer and potential readers.