A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse Use In Linguistic Thesis Abstracts By Native English Speakers And EFL Learners

In the communication process, speakers, apart from delivering propositional information, also need to employ certain metalinguistic elements to organize discourse so that listeners can better understand their meanings, and to express attitudes towards both the discourse content and the audience so that the communicative purposes can be achieved. These metalinguistic elements or metadiscourse resources have long been recognized by linguists and are generally acknowledged to be those words, phrases and structures that have nothing to do with propositional information of discourse but signal internal discourse relations and embody speaker-listener interactions. Metadiscourse thus, as can be told, is not only a kind of language phenomena but also more importantly a pragmatic and rhetorical strategy. Written discourse cannot do without metadiscourse devices as well. This study takes thesis abstracts as its focus to analyze metadiscourse resources in the genre of thesis abstracts. As an independent and recognizable genre, research paper abstracts are highly structured and largely conventionalized. They have their particular communicative purposes and unique stylistic features. Studying the features of metadiscourse in thesis abstracts thus becomes a worthwhile try.Specifically, This paper sets out to examine the similarities and differences between native English speakers and EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in metadiscourse use, possible reasons for these similarities and differences, as well as the features of metadiscourse use in thesis abstracts genre.Abstracts samples investigated in the present research come from two self-compiled corpora:NS (native English speakers’thesis abstracts) corpus and NNS (Chinese English majors’thesis abstracts) corpus. Each corpus contains 50 pieces of linguistic postgraduates thesis abstracts. After manual annotation of metadiscourse resources in all the samples based on Hyland’s Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse, a quantitative comparison of metadiscourse was first carried out to discover similarities and differences between the two corpora, by using the frequency of metadiscourse (per 10,000 words) as our unit of measurement. Next, textual analysis was undertaken to examine functions of each metadiscourse category in thesis abstract genre.It was found that there are both similarities and differences between the two groups of abstracts. Both native English speakers and Chinese postgraduates used more interactive metadiscourse features than interactional ones. The two groups of students are also similar in heavy use of transitions and hedges, and less use of self mentions and engagement markers. As for the difference, Chinese postgraduates used less interactional metadiscourse resources than native English speakers. Also the two groups are different in ranked metadiscourse categories and in frequency of most metadiscourse sub-categories. When it comes to possible reasons behind, similarities between the two groups are mainly caused by generic features of academic writing whereas differences can be attributed to reasons like disparity in abstract lengths, Chinese students’linguistic inappropriacy when writing in a foreign language, different literary traditions and influence from culture. As regards the functions of each metadiscourse category in the genre of thesis abstracts, they are decided by both the generic features of academic writing and the two major communicative purposes of thesis abstracts:the informative purpose and the persuasive purpose.