A Contrastive Study On Metadiscourse In Chinese And English College Enrollment Advertisements

Metadiscourse was first put forward by American scholar Zelling Harris in1959. Since then, it has been gradually further developed by many researchers both theoretically and empirically. Investigations into the applications of metadiscourse in a wide range of disciplines in academics and non-academics as well prove the great practicability and flexibility of the theory. To enrich the current research of metadiscourse, the author intend to conduct a contrastive study of the use of metadiscourse in English and Chinese college enrollment advertisements which has so far not been touched upon.This study analyses50college enrollment advertisements including25in Chinese and25in English which are all downloaded from the official websites of universities or colleges. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, the present study examines the general distribution of metadiscourse devices and each metadiscourse items in both English and Chinese college enrollment advertisments. Furthermore, the study also tries to account for the similarities and differences of the occurrences of metadiscourse between the two data.Statistical results indicate that there are similarities in the distribution of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese college enrollment advertisements:(1) More interactional metadiscourse devices are into use than interactive items;(2) within the subcategory, hedges, attitude markers, transitions are used more frequently, compared with other items;(3) items like boosters and code glosses share nearly some frequency in both Chinese and English piece. However, the differences presented in the use of metadiscourse devices between English and Chinese college enrollment ads are:(1) both interactional resources and interactive resources in English outnumber their counterparts in Chinese;(2) In the interactional subcategory, self mentions and attitude markers are far more frequently used in English college enrollment advertisements than in Chinese ones.(3) in the interactive subcategory, far more transitions and frame markers are available in English college enrollment advertisements than in Chinese ones, while in Chinese college enrollment advertisements, evidential markers are preponderant in comparison to English ones;(4) in the interactive subcategory, the occurrence of endophorics is near zone in Chinese corpus, while in the English samples, such occurrences are relatively numerically available.With such similarities in the use of metadiscourse in the data, the present study argues that generic and pragmatic features evident in both English and Chinese enrollment advertisements offer an explanation. As for the differences, we assume that they are stemming from both linguistics and socio-cultural differences across the two languages.The present study offers insight to the illustration of how metadiscourse devices are realized in the genre of college enrollment advertisements, thus once more proving the great flexibility of the theory in practice. Besides, it will also provide us with a new perspective for study on the characteristics of college enrollment advertisements and thus fulfill the theory to some extent.