Persuasion Function Of Metadiscourse In Research Article Abstracts

The research article(RA) abstract as an independent genre has long been studied from different perspectives due to its importance either for publication or for the launch of authors’ original creation. Metadiscourse, a newly developed concept, is a language usage which helps to organize the discourse, express authors’ opinions and take readers into consideration. Historically a growing number of researchers have performed the study on metadiscourse, which has mainly been regarded as an organizational pattern, while little attention has been paid to the persuasion function the metadiscourse might bring about. That’s why the author of this study is interested in examining the persuasion function of metadiscourse in the RA abstract.To this end, a corpus with 75 abstracts randomly selected from five English-medium international journals published in the year of 2013 and 2014 is established. The study has been carried out to analyze the persuasion function of metadiscourse on the basis of Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse(2005, p.49) within the frame of Aristotle’s(1991) three means of persuasion(logos, ethos, pathos), which has generally been considered as an authoritative creation in persuasion.The research mainly covers the following points: i) To find out the overall distribution of metadiscourse in the RA abstract; ii) To study how metadiscourse achieves persuasion by means of the three appeals in the RA abstract; iii) To investigate the frequencies of the metadiscourse resources respectively attributing to the three appeals in the RA abstract and their possible reasons for such a distribution.The result proves that: i) Metadiscourse, as a form of different metadiscourse resources, is widely used in the RA abstract. And there is a relatively high frequency for some metadiscourse resources such as transitions, hedges, frame markers and boosters. ii) By means of the three appeals, each of the metadiscourse resources can perform its own functions of realizing persuasion. All the interactive resources(such as transitions, frame markers, evidential etc.) can promote persuasion by means of logos, guiding the readers to understand the discourse by making the discourse logical and coherent. And the interactive resource evidentials and some interactional resources(including hedges, boosters, self mention and engagement markers) can promote persuasion by means of ethos appeal, helping the writer to build a reliable, cautious, confident, polite and responsible image. Some interactional resources(i.e: engagement markers, attitude markers, self mention and hedges) can promote persuasion by means of pathos, helping to engage the reader into the discourse and conducting an influence over the reader directly. iii) The frequencies of metadiscourse resources contributing to the three appeals of metadiscourse are different respectively: 49.84%(metadiscourse resources contributing to logos), 44.86%(metadiscourse resources contributing to ethos) and 37.74%(metadiscourse resources contributing to pathos), which may be attributed to the RA abstracts’ duality of being objective and subjective. This study provides valuable reference for academic circle: writers should raise their awareness of metadiscourse and make full use of the persuasion function of metadiscourse so as to better interact with the reader in their abstract writing.