| As a very important tool to contact the author and the readers, metadiscourse is often used to organize the text, contact the readers, help readers respond to the propositional content and build a good interpersonal relationship between the author and the readers. In recent years,metadiscourse has become the focus of discourse analysis and received more and more attentions.Many scholars have studied the importance of metadiscourse in different genres. However, the study of metadiscourse in English abstract is not much. As a special genre, the abstract conveys the essence of the entire paper. It plays a very important role in a paper. Therefore, based on the review of previous researches on metadiscourse, this thesis intends to study the distribution features and functions of metadiscourse in English abstracts, and provides some suggestions to scholars when they write an abstract.In this thesis, we will discuss the following three questions:(1) What kinds of subcategories of metadiscourse are used in the sample abstracts?(2) What are the distribution features of each metadiscourse item in English abstracts?(3) What are the functions of each metadiscourse item in English abstracts?The study randomly selected 40 English abstracts from four core Chinese foreign language journals published in 2012, Journal of Foreign Languages, Contemporary Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, and Foreign Language World. The four journals are all very authoritative and widely read by scholars, so the abstracts of articles in these journals are very representative. Based on Hyland’s(2005) classification of metadiscourse, this thesis uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the metadiscourse in abstracts. Because the functions of metadiscourse are influenced by contextual factors, the thesis uses the manual method to mark the metadiscourse, avoiding the mechanization and inaccuracy of statistical software.The study shows:(1) All the ten metadiscourse subcategories are used in the sample abstracts and the frequency of interactional metadiscourse is higher than interactive metadiscourse, which demonstrates the writers emphasize the interactional communication with readers when they are writing.(2) In the subcategories of metadiscourse, transition is the most frequently used device, followed by hedge and self-mention. Because the abstract shouldn’t be too long, the use of evidential, endophoric marker and engagement is the least.(3) Metadiscourse can help construct the text, lead readers to understand the writers’ writing intention and build an interpersonal relationship between the readers and the author successfully. |
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