The Study Of Communicative Action Meaning Of Metadiscourse In English Academic Discourse From The Perspective Of Communicative Action Theory

The core concept of interpreting communicative action meaning lies in attaining mutual understanding or consensus among subjects in terms of language resources. While the attainment about understanding depends on fulfilling four universal validity claims required by a valid communicative action in life world. In this world, the universal validity claims are considered as norms or regulations which can regulate human language interaction. At the same time, metadiscourse markers are a necessary part in a text, which contributes to the ways it is understood and acted on by subjects, indicating the possibility to achieve understanding about propositional information in the text. Thus, with regrard to the aforementioned core concept about communicative action meaning, it is demonstrated that the metadiscourse markers can perform a role in realizing the communicative action meaning as a type of language resources. Consequently, they can fulfill four universal validity claims to conduct a valid communicative action in the life world. Additionally, as the goal of academic discourse is to disseminate research ideas or results to related receivers, it demands interaction between a writer and a receiver to share the findings and to seek to explore a certain research issue completely and precisely. Academic discourse is a product after fulfilling such kind of interactional demands and it helps to construct an academic community where researchers are able to carry out academic activities.In this thesis, based on30English academic articles across two superordinate disciplines, namely humanities and social sciences and natural sciences, the metadiscourse markers are manually marked and then frequencies about their occurrence are figured out. It is found that the whole classifications of metadiscourse markers from interpersonal model (Ken Hyland2005) diffusely occur in30academic articles, ranging from transitions to engagement markers. This feature displays that metadiscourse markers are a type of universally-used language resources in the academic discourse. Note that characteristic of metadiscourse markers is to help understand propositional information, which implies that all the metadiscourse markers from interpersonal model can represent the communicative action meaning in the academic discourse. However, the markers cannot represent the communicative action meaning in an immediate way, but in a mediate way. Specifically, the representation about communicative action meaning is realized through interpersonal functions of the metadiscourse markers under the backdrop of academic community. The metadiscourse markers can be considered as language resources with interpersonal functions to fullfill universal validity claims in order to attain mutual understanding between writers and receivers. Therefore, these language resources play a medium role in constructing communication between the writers and receivers for the purpose of understanding the ideas or propositional information in the academic discourse, which leads to philosophical essence about the metadiscourse markers, namely ways of communication. And vice versa, the essence signals that the markers may possess a great significance to examine philosophical issues.With regard to the investigative scope of this thesis, the essence of metadiscourse markers could at least construct some criteria in the academic community. As the communicative action meaning concerns the understanding of academic propositional information, it might be necessary to conduct strategies to highlight the communicative action meaning for discourse receivers, appropriately distributing metadiscourse markers to establish interpersonal relationship with them. The ways to set up such relationship should conform to four universal validity claims which can be fulfilled via the interpersonal functions of metadiscourse markers. Hence, it is assumed that (i) communicative action between the writers and receivers should be apperceptable by using transitions and frame markers to connect propositions in discourse and guide the receivers to know about the discourse boundaries respectively;(ii) communication should be truthful through using evidentials to offer evidence or facts while endophoric markers and code glosses present reliable and credible propositions;(iii) communication should be sincere via utilizing hedges and boosters to shoulder the responsibility for assertiveness about the ideas and attitude markers for revealing affective intention of expressing ideas;(iv) communication should be correct in terms of distributing self mentions to construct the writer’s identity and engagement markers to foreground the reader’s image in the academic community. And these assumptions might suggest an effective way to carry out academic writing for the writers and academic writing pedagogy for the teachers in classroom.