Patterns And Meanings Of Interactive Sentence Stems In Academic English Texts

Metadiscourse embodies interactions.It is the meaning component of a discourse beyond its propositional aspects,including the explicit means of organizing a discourse,interacting with the reader,as well as expressing the writer’s attitude toward either its content or the reader.It is increasingly accepted that academic discourse is not simply the static display of academic achievements but composed of a series of dynamic academic interactions and social practice.Metadiscourse,as an important device to link writers,readers and the text,has become the focus of academic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics in recent years.However,previous metadiscourse studies mainly investigated the single word items or fixed/semi-fixed expressions rather than clause-level multi-word sequences,and due to the limitation of extraction methods and technology,many of them are confined to using examples provided by pioneers of metadiscourse research(such as Hyland & Tse)or their similar expressions.This thesis investigates a particular type of metadiscourse resources,namely,Sentence Stems(SSs),which are characteristic of academic writing but have not yet attracted broad attention.Based on the academic metadiscourse model(Hyland & Tse,2004),this thesis describes three prominent interactive metadiscourse functions of SSs,that is,frame markers,endophoric markers and evidentials,and characterizes their typical patterns and meanings in academic texts.In terms of discourse strategies,this thesis classifies frame markers under “locating” resources,while endophoric markers and evidentials under “linking” resources.It is argued that the academic writer tactically uses both discourse strategies to manage information,organize discourse,direct his reader’s perception of the text in a way preferred by the writer,and thus realize the communicative goal of “academic interaction”.This thesis explores interactive SSs at the clausal level,and its significance lies not only in the contribution to the metadiscourse research in academic texts,but also in its implications for ESL(i.e.English as a second language)students in their academic writing.