An Analysis Of Metadiscourse In Chinese And American University Presidents’ Commencement Addresses

University presidents’ commencement addresses,as one type of institutional discourse,have the characteristics of conventionality,ritual and stylization.They are planned formal discourse,which is transmitted to the audience orally by the speaker.The speaker expresses his or her viewpoints combining verbal language with body language to achieve the purpose of inspiring,encouraging and persuading the audience.Metadiscourse is used to organize discourse,express the author’s viewpoint and it involves the reader’s reaction(Hyland,2005).It can not only help the audience understand the organization of a text,but also establish interaction between the audience and the speaker.However,present studies on commencement addresses are mainly conducted from the perspective of stylistics and pragmatics.Few researches are conducted from the perspective of metadiscourse.This thesis examines metadiscourse in Chinese and American university presidents’ commencement addresses from a contrastive perspective,aiming to provide some writing suggestions for English and Chinese speeches.The thesis selects 30 Chinese university presidents’ commencement addresses and 30 American university presidents’ commencement addresses as research data.The 30 Chinese universities and 30 American universities are randomly chosen from prestigious universities.Under the theoretical framework of Hyland’s(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse,interactive metadiscourse,interactional metadiscourse as well as their sub-categories(transition markers,frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials,code glosses,hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self-mentions and engagement markers)are investigated with the help of analytical and statistical corpus software Ant Conc3.5.8.Combined with qualitative and quantitative analysis,the thesis aims to examine the overall distribution of metadiscourse in Chinese and American university presidents’ commencement addresses and reveal the similarities and differences of distribution of metadiscourse between the two corpora.The results show that metadiscourse resources are widely used both in Chinese and American university presidents’ commencement addresses.In addition,there exist some similarities as well as differences in metadiscourse uses between the two corpora.The main similarities are as follows:(1)interactional resources are used much more frequently than interactive resources;(2)among these sub-categories of metadiscourse,engagement markers are the most frequently used and endophoric markers are the least frequently used.The major differences are:(1)American university presidents’ commencement addresses contain more metadiscourse compared with Chinese ones,which shows American university presidents attach much importance to establish interaction with their audience;(2)as for interactive resources,frame markers ranks the first in Chinese university presidents’ commencement addresses whereas transition markers are used most frequently in English counterpart,which indicates that Chinese presidents pay more attention to the text structure.The research significance of this thesis can be summarized as follows: Firstly,this study reveals the metadiscourse regularities of university presidents’ commencement addresses to a certain extent.Therefore it can help scholars know more about this kind of genre.Secondly,it also provides some enlightenment for English learning.Students can improve their writing skills by learning metadiscourse.In addition,it also provides a new theoretical perspective for the study of university presidents’ addresses.