A Corpus-based Diachronic Study Of Metadiscursive Nouns In Classical Economic Works

Metadiscourse has grown into a research focus in the field of disciplinary discourse in recent years.However,few studies have explored the usage of metadiscourse in economic discourse and fewer studies have paid attention to metadiscursive nouns(hereinafter as MNs)used in the classical economic works from a diachronic perspective.An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations(hereinafter as WN;Smith,1776),The Theory of Political Economy(hereinafter as PE;Jevons,1871)and The General Theory of Employment,Interest and Money(hereinafter as GT;Keynes,1936)are great economic works that lead three economic revolutions.Conducted from a corpus linguistic perspective,the present study is intended to fill in the gap by investigating the usage of MNs in the three classical economic works.The general research orientation is decomposed into four research questions:(1)What are the overall frequency and distribution of metadiscursive nouns in each economic work?(2)How do the three economists employ interactive metadiscursive nouns to guide readers through the three economic works?(3)How do the three economists express stance and involve readers in the three economic works through interactional metadiscursive nouns?(4)What factors could account for the possible observed patterns of metadiscursive nouns in the three economic works,if any? In order to address the above research questions,a corpus of classical economic works has been built and analyzed with the aid of the corpus tool AntConc.The results show that:(1)The determiner + N is the most frequent structure where 91.77% of MNs are used,while there is an increasing trend in the overall frequency of MNs from WN through PE to GT.(2)In the interactive dimension,the three economists employ less cataphoric use of MNs but prefer using anaphoric cohesive MNs(over 90%)to guide readers.(3)In the interactional dimension,the three economists use less MNs to engage readers but employ over 78% of stance MNs.There is also an increasing trend in the frequency of stance MNs from WN through PE to GT.(4)The same genre and discipline of the three economic works lead to the observed similarities,whereas the growth of disciplinarity and the professionality of target readers result in the observed different patterns of the three economic works in using MNs.The present study sheds new theoretical insights into the nature and development of economics.The research findings also provide significant practical implications for linguistic as well as economic researchers and learners.