Acomparative Study On Metadiscourse As Persuasive Power In Chinese Andamerican Commencement Speeches

Metadiscourse is a relatively new concept in discourse analysis, which has attractedan increasing attention recently. Scholars have investigated metadiscourse in differentgenres, and the studies mainly focus on written discourse. However, commencementspeech, as a subcategory of public speaking, is rarely touched upon.Commencement speakers would like to give some advices about future life based ontheir own experiences and beliefs, they hope that their audiences could accept their beliefsand benefit from them, so commencement speeches are persuasive in nature. Hyland’sinterpersonal model of metadiscourse is adopted in order to identify the metadiscourseitems and takes the three models of persuasion as theoretical frame for further analysis.The author of this thesis selects29Chinese commencement speeches and30Americancommencement speeches as the data. With the help of AntConc and SPSS software to getdata and compare the differences of them, the author tries to make a contrastive study onthe application of metadiscourse and the achievement of persuasion throughmetadiscourse in Chinese andAmerican commencement speeches.By quantitative analysis of frequency, proportion of metadiscouse and qualitativeanalysis of the data, it was found that1) both Chinese and American speakers use moreinteractional metadiscourse than interactive metadiscourse, in order to increase interactionwith audiences;2) compared with Chinese speakers, American speakers use far moremetadiscourse in their speeches, and the using of each subcategory differs greatly, whichmay reflect various differences on language characteristic, culture, identity of speakers, etc.3) as for how metadiscourse contribute to three appeals of persuasion, both Chinese andAmerican speakers apply interactive metadiscourse such as transitions, frame markers,code glosses and endophoric markers to make the content more coherent and reasonable,which assists in achieving rational appeal; interactional metadiscourse devices like hedges, boosters and engagement markers together with evidentials are helpful in contributingcredible appeal, but Chinese speakers tend to use evidentials to add authority of theirspeeches while American speakers use hedges, boosters and engagement makers toestablish their unique character; in terms of affective appeal, the combination ofengagement markers, attitude markers and self mention is used frequently. But Chinesespeakers usually apply attitude markers to lift graduates’ spirit while American speakersuse attitude markers to draw audiences’ attention to certain part and thus make theirintended meaning being received for audiences.This thesis studies metadiscourse from a new perspective—how it helps to achievepersuasiveness of commencement speeches. It is hoped that the research would enrich thestudy of metadiscourse and promote the understanding and writing of commencementspeeches from the perspective of metadiscourse as persuasive power.