| Metadiscourse is a term which was coined by Zellig Harris, and it is often used inlanguage teaching, daily communication and discourse analysis. It aims at providing away for understanding language in use, standing for the writer’s or the speaker’sintentions to direct the receiver to understand the text. Metadiscourse has been furtherstudied by many scholars since it came into being, including Williams (1981), VandeKopple (1985), Crismore (1989), and Hyland (2005), etc. And it has become a basiccharacteristic in people’s communication. Metadiscourse mainly focuses on the internalstructure of a text, and pays attention to the ways how the writers or speakers organizethe contents, involve themselves into their work, and guide the readers or receivers. Itnot only helps the writers express their ideas and stances, but also directs the audienceto have a better understanding of the text.So far, there have several categorizations of metadiscourse, but the currentcategorization of metadiscourse is developed on the basis of the theoretical frameworkof Vande Kopple. Vande Kopple classified the metadiscourse into two kinds on the basisof Halliday’s three functions of language. These are textual metadiscourse andinterpersonal metadiscourse. According to the previous studies, Hyland (2005) hasfurther developed the categorization of metadiscourse and made some improvements.On the basis of the three principles of metadiscourse, Hyland (2005) has dividedmetadiscourse into two categories, including interactive and interactional metadiscourse.And the subcategories of interactive metadiscourse include code glosses, endophoricmarkers, evidentials, frame markers, and transition markers, and the subcategories ofinteractional metadiscourse include attitude markers, boosters, self mention,engagement markers and hedges.Therefore, on the basis of Ken Hyland’s (2005) theoretical framework andclassification system of metadiscourse, this paper adopts a scientific way ofcorpus-based study to analyze and contrast the application of metadiscourse in Englisheconomy and science&tech news quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper aims toinvestigate and analyze the distribution and frequency of metadiscourse, and mainlyaddresses the following four problems:(1) the distribution and features ofmetadiscourse used in economy news;(2) the distribution and features of metadiscourseused in science&tech news;(3) the similarities and differences between metadiscourse markers used in economy news and science&tech news;(4) the reason why thesesimilarities and differences exist.The results show that the writer uses interactional metadiscourse markers such assome hedges and self mentions to make the news more objective in economy news,except using some interactive metadiscourse markers to organize the content and guidethe reader. And for science&tech news, the writer’s main purposes are to convey theinformation orderly and logically, pay attention to the description of the facts, and try toconvince the reader by using some experiments. Therefore, the interactivemetadiscourse markers are frequently used. And there are some similarities anddifferences between the application of metadiscourse in economy news and science&tech news. This thesis aims to help the reader have a better understanding of the use ofmetadiscourse in the news item, and improve their comprehensive ability and writinglevel of economy news item and science&tech news item. |
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