Success With Interaction

Roger Ebert,who was a professional film critic in Chicago Sum-Time,is commonly admired as the “greatest film critic in America” by readers and film critics.Roger Ebert became the first film critic to gain the Pulitzer Prize in 1975,which is the highest award in the field of news industry.Roger had adopted plain language to explain professional filmmaking items and preferred to build effective writer-reader interaction,with the communicative purpose of sharing filmmaking knowledge and professional comments.Movie reviews,as a media discourse,has aroused linguists' attention these years for its increasing popularity.Through the study of related researches at home and abroad,the author discovers that previous researches has been covered mainly in the range of news report,while evaluative media discourses,such as movie reviews and news commentary,have received insufficient attention.In this case,the research aims to make an in-depth study on Roger Ebert's 60 movie reviews from perspectives of generic structural potential and metadiscourse analysis to reveal the generic features of his reviews with the combining of discourse analysis and corpus analysis.The micro perspective analysis will focus on structures of Roger Ebert's 60 movie reviews,including the optional elements,obligatory elements and the potential order of all elements,in order to reveal the writer-reader interaction in structural level,on the basis of Hasan's Generic Structural Potential.In terms of micro perspective,the investigation will be carried out firstly by labeling metadiscourse markers in the corpus with the assistance of BSFU Qualitative Code1.2.Metdiscourse markers include transitions,code glosses,evidentials,hedges,boosters,attitude markers,engagement markers,and self mentions.The sequential step continues to unfold the distribution of eight markers in the corpus and in the different elements and to analyze the writer-reader interaction through different metadiscourse markers in the discourses.Results of the study have revealed that the distribution of structural potential and metadiscourse is conductive to establish writer-reader interaction in the movie review.Film critics adopt different structural elements and metadiscourse markers to involve readers in the discourse.After analyzing the generic structural potential and metadiscourse of Roger's movie reviews,it is perceptible that Roger has taken intoaccount readers' knowledge,expectation and textual experience during writing movie reviews,which is also one of the important reasons why his reviews have been popular in half a century.