| A book review,as a form of evaluative discourse,aims to introduce and comment on the newly-published books or a series of works.In the field of book review,academic book reviews have been the hot spot among scholars.By contrast,studies on non-academic book reviews are rare.In fact,non-academic book reviews are an important channel for the public to be well-informed of the newly-published books on the market.A well-written book reviews of this kind will undoubtedly arouse the potential readers' interest and thus promote the sales of the book in question.In this light,the interaction between the reviewer and the reader is significant for successful non-academic book reviews.It has been found that interactional metadiscourse resources contribute to the construction of the interaction between the writer and the reader,which is helpful for the writer to convey his/her views explicitly and invite the reader into the discourse.The thesis investigate the textual features non-academic book reviews from the perspective of interactional metadiscourse use.Based on Hyland's(2005a)classifications and Fu's(2012)interactional metadiscourse model,the thesis adopts an integrated taxonomy of interactional metadiscourse which includes two broad categories: stance features and engagement features.Stance features contain four sub-categories: hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mentions.Engagement features have five sub-categories: reader pronouns,directives,questions,shared knowledge and personal asides.The thesis selects two corpora which consist of 100 book reviews written in English and 100 book reviews written in Chinese.By conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis,the thesis aims to investigate the similarities and differences of interactional metadiscourse uses in the two comparable corpora.The findings show that there are many interactional metadiscourse markers in the two corpora.There are two distinct similarities.First,both English and Chinese book reviewers employ more stance features than engagement features.Second,within stance dimension,attitude markers and hedges appear the most in both English and Chinese corpus.Notably,there are two significant differences.Firstly,English book reviews contain more interactional metadiscourse markers than Chinese book reviews,especially in the sub-categories of attitude markers,self-mentions,shared knowledge and personal asides.Secondly,within engagement dimension,English corpus contains the most personal asides while the frequency of reader pronouns appears the most in Chinese corpus.According to the analysis of interactional metadiscourse in English Book Reviews and Chinese Book Reviews,we find that interactional metadiscourse play an important role inwriting.The use of interactional metadiscourse can make the writings intelligible and comprehensible as well as enhance the interactions with readers.Thus the interactional metadiscourse offers important implications for writing. |
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