| The thesis mainly attempts to put Hyland's theory of metadiscourse into analyzing English movie reviews. There are various definitions and classifications of metadiscourse. The thesis follows Hyland's definition that metadiscourse is the cover term for the self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meaning in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community. Based on Hyland's framework of interactive/interactional metadiscourse, the thesis selects 140 movie reviews from the Yahoo website as data and analyzes its metadiscoursal features and functions. All of the movies are the top ten movies in American Weekly Box Office in the year of 2010; in addition, all the movie reviews are taken from famous American newspapers—for instance, USA Today, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and New York Post. The findings suggest that English movie reviews employ more interactional metadiscourse than interactive ones by 14%. with transition markers, attitude markers and code glosses, the most common devices; and frame markers as well as evidentials and endophoric markers the least. This could be accounted for by the genre of movie reviews that is concerned more with the interaction between writers and readers, about readers'expectation, feelings and reactions. Therefore, movie reviews seem more casual, like spoken English. Then, metadiscourse in movie reviews is compared with that of research articles. The comparison indicates that academic research articles make use of more interactive resources, with much more frame markers, evidentials, and endophoric markers. This contrast between movie reviews and research articles is due to genre differences. Research articles need to report research data, findings, and research methods to its relevant discourse communities in an appropriate way to get accepted, while movie reviews do not aim to force readers to adopt their views, but rather to negotiate with readers to achieve their communicative goals, either to persuade or to give advice and information. |
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