The Analysis Of Metadiscourse In English Abstracts Of Thesis And Dissertations

Metadiscourse as a relatively new concept in the field of discourse analysis, paidmore attention on by a growing number of academic researchers, has become thefocus of the study. Many stylistic researches have been proved the importance ofmetadiscourse in different genres. Some researchers have done sufficient researcheson grammar means of writings and the generation of contents. However, they neglectthe other important aspect of communication and interaction between writers andreaders through their writings..The abstract, as a special genre, summarizes the full text and conveys the essenceof the entire paper, the wording of the statement in writing abstracts should beobjective, accurate and effective. Furthermore, the paper randomly selected120excellent English abstracts of national outstanding master dissertations as a corpusaccording to Hyland interpersonal metadiscourse classification model framework.This study uses the manual method to label metadiscourse features, avoiding themechanization of statistical software.This study aims to analyze metadiscourse analysis in the distribution and the useof specific features on English abstracts of master’s thesis. The research has shownthat the metadiscourse can be an effective way to construct discourse, and guidereaders to understand the textual structure in order to persuade the readers tounderstand the intention of the author’s writing and establish an interactionalrelationship between the author and the reader.This paper was designed to reveal how the metadiscourse can effectively help theauthors to convey the intention of their writings and establish interpersonalrelationship between author and reader, so as to provide the valuable information inwriting English abstract and raise the awareness of using metadiscourse in written textfor Chinese students.