Metadiscourse

This contribution focuses on one particular politeness formula for requests, fare la carità di 'be so good as to (give)'. The aim of the paper was to reconstruct the meanings and contexts for the usage of fare la carità di in nineteenth-century Italy. The following sources were used: conduct books, dictionaries, novels and diachronic corpora. The essay first looked at politeness metadiscourse and examined the available language advice for requests in CGIO, a corpus of 51 nineteenth-century Italian conduct books. However, as there is none available for fare la carità di, three nineteenth-century dictionaries were consulted. These findings from the metadiscourse were then read against those from a qualitative analysis covering all the examples found in two of the most influential novels of that period, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, 'The Betrothed', 1840, and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, 1883. Finally, quantitative data from the historical corpora DiaCORIS and MIDIA were provided. This combined analysis (using metadiscourse alongside qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative data) produced the following results: the formula is used in two contexts, to make a (sometimes forceful) request and to beg for a handout. Both appear in roughly equal proportions until the end of World War II. After that, fare la carità di disappears from DiaCORIS. The paper tentatively concludes that the absence of the formula from the advice on requests in conduct books may be partly explained by its use as a specialised marker for alms-seeking, given that conduct books fiercely criticise almsgiving to the undeserving poor.

The present study looks into the variations in the frequencies and pragmatic functions of the metadiscourse markers known as boosters, and in particular, with regard to their verb forms. Three corpora have been compiled to this end, covering the fields of Engineering, Medicine and Linguistics. The corpora were manually annotated for metadiscourse markers, boosters included, by a group of annotators. A predetermined list was used for annotation, but throughout the annotation process, the list was modified to better reflect the use of metadiscourse in the corpora. The raw count of the occurrences of verb boosters shows clear differences between the corpora, which in turn confirms previous studies of this type. However, the range of verbs identified was very similar, pointing to a large overlap among the three. The three top frequency verb boosters also showed a clear overlap for Engineering and Medicine, but revealed considerable differences with Linguistics. This study has been conducted within a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (FFI2016-77941-P).

The blog is an increasingly familiar newcomer to the panoply of academic genres, offering researchers the opportunity to disseminate their work to new and wider audiences of experts and interested lay people. This digital medium, however, also brings challenges to writers in the form of a relatively unpredictable readership and the potential for immediate, public and potentially hostile criticism. To understand how academics in the social sciences respond to this novel rhetorical situation, we explore how they discoursally recontextualize in blogs the scientific information they have recently published in journal articles. Based on two corpora of 30 blog posts and 30 journal articles with the same authors and topics, we examine the ways researchers carefully reconstruct a different writer persona and relationship with their readers using stance and engagement model. In addition to supporting the view that the academic blog is a hybrid genre situated between academic and journalistic...

In this article, I argue that academic language is a raciolinguistic
ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient
and in need of remediation. I propose language architecture as an
alternative framing of language that can serve as a point of entry for
resisting these raciolinguistic ideologies in both research and practice.
I use this framework as a lens for analyzing the literacy demands
of the Common Core State Standard (CCSS). Using data collected as
part of a larger ethnographic study, I illustrate how Latinx children
from bilingual communities have unique opportunities for engaging
in the language architecture called for in the standards. I then
describe a unit plan that I developed from this perspective. I end
with a call for situating language architecture within broader political
struggles seeking to dismantle the political and economic inequities
that are the root causes of deficit perspectives of Latinxs and other
racialized students.

If your library has access to Springer Link a full version of this book can be downloaded via: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-40703-6 . 

This book focuses on the discursive processes that allow activists to make sense of themselves and of the modes of politics they engage in. It shows how political and metadiscursive awareness develop in tandem with a reconfiguration of one’s sense of self. The author offers an integrated pragmatic and poststructuralist perspective on self and subjectivity. He draws on Essex style discourse theory, early pragmatist philosophy, and linguistic pragmatics, arguing for a notion of discourse as a multi-dimensional practice of articulation. Demonstrating the analytical power of this perspective, he puts his approach to work in an analysis of activist discourse on integration and minority issues in Flanders, Belgium. Subjects articulate a whole range of norms, values, identities and narratives to each other when they engage in political discourse. This book offers a way to analyse the logics that structure political awareness and the associated boundaries for discursive self-interpretation.

'At a time in which notions of both politics and activism are being profoundly reshaped, Zienkowski's incisive analysis goes to the heart of what may drive such changes. Empirically delicate and theoretically astute, this is discourse analysis at its best.' - Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

'This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the discursive logics that shape self and society, as well as how to study them. It combines discourse theory and pragmatic perspectives on interaction, generating an innovative interpretive and functional heuristic for doing poststructuralist discourse analysis. As an added bonus, it provides a creative and critical contribution to discussions on the workings of ideological fantasy. Highly recommended!' - Jason Glynos, Reader, University of Essex, UK

'If you ever wondered what the world looks like through the eyes of well-informed and politically active members of disadvantaged minorities, you must read "Articulations of self and politics in activist discourse". As a discourse analysis with a truly multidisciplinary orientation, Jan Zienkowski offers unrivaled insights which, based on research in a Belgian context, have unfortunately gained relevance through recent dramatic events.' - Jef Verschueren, Professor, University of Antwerp, Belgium

This thesis reports an exploratory and contrastive corpus study examining two phenomena in postgraduate academic writing: expressing commitment/detachment and signalling authorial presence in dissertations. More specifically, the overall purpose of the study is to investigate how postgraduate academic writers from particular contexts build their academic stance and voice by employing a range of linguistic items that could be identified as hedges, boosters and authorial references. The corpus consists of a total of 90 discussions sections of master’s dissertations, 30 from Turkish L1 writers, 30 from Turkish writers of English and 30 from UK English L1 writers. A range of items, discourse functions and roles were determined during the pilot study via Nvivo 9. Then, the whole corpus was searched and analysed via WordSmith 5.0 based on the linguistic item list signalling certainty/doubt or authorial presence. In order to address two crucial phenomena in dissertation writing of postgrad...

Les articles réunis dans ce numéro sont issus de la réflexion menée dans le cadre du colloque international organisé par le groupe COnTEXTES à l’Université de Liège, les 12 et 13 mai 2011. Ces deux journées ont été désignées par un titre dans lequel chaque mot compte : « Querelles d’écrivains (XIXe-XXIe siècles) : de la dispute à la polémique. Médias, discours et enjeux ». Soulignons d’abord le choix chronologique consistant à initier la réflexion au seuil du XIXe siècle, siècle d’autonomisation du champ littéraire qui voit s’internaliser les « règles du jeu » et se spécifier pratiques et discours, et à étendre cette réflexion jusqu’aux débuts du XXIe siècle, témoin de l’affirmation croissante d’un rôle public de l’écrivain en intellectuel ou en personnalité médiatique. Avouons ensuite l’ébauche d’hypothèse selon laquelle une certaine définition relationnelle régirait les rapports entre dispute et polémique : d’une part, il y existerait une différence entre ces deux phénomènes situables dans la catégorie plus générale de la querelle qui semble ainsi les subsumer ; d’autre part, une évolution temporelle et/ou une progression logique feraient de la polémique une amplification ou un dépassement de la dispute.

De telles distinctions conceptuelles ne vont pas de soi. Elles appelaient, sinon un bilan exhaustif, du moins un parcours transversal ciblé sur quelques-unes des nombreuses interrogations que suscite le phénomène multifactoriel de la querelle lorsqu’il concerne des écrivains. Car c’est bien la question liminaire de ce numéro de COnTEXTES : y a-t-il une spécificité de la querelle en littérature ? Il semble que la réponse soit à chercher dans les caractéristiques disciplinaires qui guident la définition d’une telle spécificité, doublement rapportable au rôle fondamental de l’illusio dans la dynamique du champ littéraire et au statut de médium de la littérature, capable de constituer des prises de positions – dans les trois sens d’être, de former et d’établir.

Abstract: This paper proposes a notion of critique as a public metadiscourse that allows subjects to recognize , rearticulate and/or reconfigure the logics and rationalities that lead to social suffering. It analyses the way critique operates in a controversy triggered by Flemish nationalist politicians who claim that racism is [a] relative [concept]. The author proposes to analyse the associated debate by means of an in-terpretive and functional discourse analysis. This heuristic operationalizes the poststructuralist concept of articulation. The author identifies different types of critical discursive intervention (CDI) that delin-eate the boundaries of the racism-is-relative debate: hegemonic claims, ideological disqualifications, metalinguistic disqualifications, and concretization strategies. Such interventions haven been articulated by citizens, activists, academics, and politicians across a variety of mostly written media between 2013 and 2015. It is through the play of discursive interventions that social actors challenge and negotiate political boundaries for interpretation. The article demonstrates that most critiques on assertions of racism being [a] relative [concept] do not undermine the logics and rationalities informing racism is relative discourse. It also shows that discourse analysts need to differentiate between different modes of critique in order to examine the complex acts of rearticulation that take place in any debate.

Zusammenfassung: Der folgende Artikel plädiert für einen Kritikbegriff, der Kritik als öffentlichen Meta-Diskurs konzipiert, welches es Subjekten ermöglicht, all jene Logiken und Rationalitäten, die so-ziales Leiden verursachen, zu erkennen, zu re-artikulieren und zu re-konfigurieren. Veranschaulicht wird dies anhand einer Analyse der spezifischen Kritikformen bzw.-modi innerhalb der von flämisch-nationalistischen Politikern initiierten Debatte um die vermeintliche Relativität von Rassismus. Die Analyse dieser Debatte orientiert sich hierbei an einer interpretativen und funktionalen Konzeption der Diskursanalyse. Für diese Analyseheuristik ist eine Operationalisierung des poststrukturalistischen Ar-tikulationskonzepts zentral. Im Zuge der Untersuchung werden verschiedene Arten und Weisen der kritisch-diskursiven Intervention in diese Debatte identifiziert. Dadurch können gleichsam die Grenzen bzw. Grenzmarker der »Rassismus-ist-relativ-Debatte« skizziert werden: hegemoniale Ansprüche, ideo-logische und metalinguistische De-Legitimierungen sowie Konkretisierungsstrategien. Die identifizier-ten kritischen Interventionen wurden von einer Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Akteure (Bürger, Aktivisten, Wissenschaftler und Politiker) innerhalb verschiedenster Medienpublikationen, im Zeitraum zwischen 2013 und 2015, artikuliert. Die Grenzen politischer Interpretationsräume werden von sozialen Akteu-ren durch dieses Spiel diskursiver Interventionen verhandelt und herausgefordert. Der folgende Artikel veranschaulicht, dass die meisten Kritiken der Behauptung, Rassismus sei relativ, die diesem rassisti-schen Diskurs zugrundeliegenden Logiken und Artikulationsformen nicht radikal genug herausfordern bzw. untergraben. Auf theoretischer Ebene sollte er zudem DiskursforscherInnen für die Differenzie-rung spezifischer Kritikmodi sensibilisieren, da nur durch eine solche differenzierende Identifizierung die komplexen Artikulationsformen einer öffentlichen Debatte angemessen analysiert werden können.

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on an analysis of 240 published research papers from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of inter-subjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers.

Metadiscourse is the interpersonal resources used to organise a discourse or the writer's stance towards either its content or the reader. It is a way of looking at language use based on the fact that, as we speak or write, we monitor the possible responses of others, making decisions about the kind of effects we are having on our listeners or readers and adjusting our language to best achieve our purposes.  In this chapter I will elaborate what metadiscourse is, outline a descriptive framework, and discuss its role in speech and writing and across languages.

This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results. The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources. The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.

Nowadays, the traveller/tourist is the one who increasingly manages her/his own trips and journeys through the internet, without any aid of intermediaries such a travel agents, etc. As a result, a new term has been coined, that of tourist 2.0, her/his decisions depending directly from the web sites announcing touristic services and products. Therefore, specific linguistic and visual mechanisms and strategies have to be borne in mind when constructing these promotional web sites so as to assist their generic persuasive aim. These linguistic strategies are realized by means of specific rhetorical functions such as description, exemplification, suggestion, etc. and of interpersonality, the discursive interactional function that designates the relation between text sender and receiver through specific markers that vary cross-linguistically and modulate persuasion through the actual production of those rhetorical functions. It is then absolutely necessary to identify and analyzethesestrategies and their cross-linguistic differences in order to incorporate them systematically into the contents of touristic promotion web sites.

Keywords:  tourist 2.0, rhetorical functions, interpersonality/ interactional function, linguistic strategies, markers, persuasion.

Resumen:


Hoy en día, el turista/viajero es cada vez más quien gestiona personalmente sus propios viajes a través de internet. Así, se ha acuñado el nuevo término turista 2.0, cuyas decisiones dependen directamente de las páginas web a través de las cuales se anuncian servicios y productos turísticos. Por lo tanto, la construcción de estas webs promocionales ha de tener en cuenta ciertos mecanismos y estrategias lingüísticas y visuales que cumplan el objetivo genérico de los géneros de promoción turística: la persuasión. Estas estrategias lingüísticas se construyen a través de las funciones retóricas propias de estos géneros, tales como la descripción, la ejemplificación, la sugerencia, etc., así como de la interpersonalidad, función discursiva que designa la relación que se establece entre emisor y receptor del texto a través de marcadores, sujeta a variaciones lingüísticas y culturales y que modaliza la persuasión en la realización de dichas funciones retóricas. Será, pues, absolutamente necesario el análisis de estasestrategiasy de sus diferencias de una lengua a otra con objeto de incorporarlas de forma sistemática al contenido lingüístico de las webs de promoción turística.

Palabras clave: turista 2.0, interpersonalidad, funciones retóricas, estrategias lingüísticas, marcadores, persuasión.

Talking Donald Trump examines the language of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from the perspective of sociocultural linguistics. This book offers an insight into the many stages of Trump’s political career, from his initial campaign for the Republican nomination, up to his presidency.
Drawing from speeches, debates, and interviews, as well as parodies and
public reactions to his language, Sclafani explores how Trump’s language
has produced such polarized reactions among the electorate. In analyzing the linguistic construction of Donald Trump’s political identity, Sclafani’s incisive study sheds light on the discursive construction of political identity and the conflicting language ideologies associated with the discourse of leadership in modern US society. Talking Donald Trump provides a crucial contemporary example of the interaction between sociolinguistics and political science, and is key reading for advanced students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and politics, communication studies and rhetoric.

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts.  Style guides and textbooks commonly advise them to remove themselves from their texts and provide the grammatical means to do so. This advice, however, ignores the fact that effective academic writing always carries the individual’s point of view. In this paper I briefly explore the most visible expressions of a writer’s presence in a text: the use of hedges and first person pronouns, to show there is actually considerable scope for the negotiation of identity in academic writing

Metadiscourse - the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners - is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, pragmatics and language teaching.  This interest has grown up over the past 40 years driven by a dual purpose. The first is a desire to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of use.  That is, how individuals use language to orient to and interpret particular communicative situations, and especially how they draw on their understandings of these to make their intended meanings clear to their interlocutors.  The second is to employ this knowledge in the service of language and literacy education.  But while many researchers and teachers find it to be a conceptually rich and analytically powerful idea, it is not without difficulties of definition, categorisation and analysis.  In this paper I explore the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and map its influence and directions through a state of the art analysis of the main online academic databases and current published research.

O presente trabalho busca compreender as funções da metadiscursividade como
recurso textual-discursivo presente na produção textual de Mano Brown em duas entrevistas do campo jornalístico, concedidas ao programa Roda Viva (TV Cultura, 2007) e ao programa Papo com Benja (L!TV, 2011). Para isso, partimos dos estudos textuais-interativos sobre a autorreflexividade e sua materialização no metadiscurso (KOCH, 2004; RISSO E JUBRAN, 1998; LIMA, 2009), bem como sobre os trabalhos de Bourdieu (1989a [1975]; 1989b; 1996 [1994]; 1997 [1996]) acerca da noção de campo social e dos mecanismos de organização do campo jornalístico. A nosso ver, a metadiscursividade consiste em um recurso textualdiscursivo por meio do qual Mano Brown, agente representativo e prestigiado no movimento hip hop e no campo da produção cultural da periferia, busca lidar com a interação no decorrer das entrevistas, mas também com sua posição e representação no campo jornalístico. Nossa hipótese é de que sua participação nas entrevistas selecionadas é marcada por expedientes metadiscursivos cujas funções estão associadas aos tópicos discursivos em questão e à posição do entrevistado no interior do movimento hip hop e no campo da produção cultural da periferia.
Para a investigação dessa hipótese, percorremos, primeiramente, os escritos de Bourdieu na obra Sobre a televisão (1997 [1996]). Além disso, dedicamo-nos a uma observação dos modos de socialização de Mano Brown (Cf. SILVA, 2012), haja vista que, embora sua trajetória faça com que disponha de prestígio e representatividade no campo da produção cultural da periferia e no movimento hip hop, a nosso ver, não deixa de incidir sobre o rapper uma estigmatização (GOFFMAN, 1988 [1963]) decorrente de sua posição de liderança e de um posterior contato com outros campos, como o jornalístico. Nossos passos metodológicos envolveram uma
discussão sobre a metadiscursividade em entrevistas jornalísticas e uma reconstrução dos contextos jornalísticos que compõem nossas amostras. Foram feitos levantamentos dos expedientes metadiscursivos produzidos por Mano Brown nas entrevistas selecionadas, com vistas a analisar a incidência desses recursos nos diferentes tópicos discursivos desenvolvidos nos programas. A partir desses passos, dedicamo-nos às análises de exemplos característicos da produção do metadiscurso na fala do rapper em alguns tópicos discursivos. As conclusões demonstram uma manifestação contínua da reflexividade de Mano Brown em ambas as entrevistas, seja para discutir os pressupostos, perspectivas e valores expostos nas falas dos
entrevistadores, seja para se posicionar sobre diversas questões. Além disso, as análises indicam a participação do metadiscurso nas tomadas de posição de Mano Brown, sobretudo quando tópicos que versam sobre sua representatividade ou sua estigmatização são instaurados nessas entrevistas.

Although metadiscourse has been examined in different genres, such as academic papers, newspaper editorials, school textbooks, and the like, still relatively little attention has been given to the discourse of cyber-genres, particularly blogs or weblogs.  Using Hyland’s (2005) model, this paper examined the interactive and the interactional metadiscourse in Philippine investigative journalism blogs where English is used as a second language or L2.  The corpus analyzed was taken from 20 investigative journalism blogs published in http://pcij.org/blog/, the official website of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) blogs.  Based on the findings of the study, it can be inferred that there is much evidence in the use of metadiscourse in Philippine investigative journalism blogs; thus, the use of metadiscourse as an appropriate linguistic resource is supplemental and essential.  The data revealed that the investigative journalism blogs have a higher frequency of use of interactive resources, allowing writers to organize and structure their propositions so that the text becomes more coherent to the readers.  Among the five categories of interactive resources, the use of evidentials has the highest frequency.  As regards the use of interactional resources, hedges are the most frequent.  The findings of the study likewise provide pedagogical implications for ESL writing.

From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper reports on the findings of an exploratory study examining the features of the academic texts produced by three groups of postgraduates: native speakers of Turkish (TL1), English (EL1) and Turkish speakers of English (EL2). To this end, the study involves a microdiscourse analysis of a corpus of ninety discussion sections of dissertations to identify and classify the choices made by the authors for expressing commitment/detachment in presenting knowledge claims. The results indicated interesting similarities and differences across the groups in the ways in which writers qualified their level of commitment to a higher level and detachment from the claims in their writing. In other words, this can be described as a cline from the highest to the lowest, even intentionally withholding their commitment. By looking at the hedging and boosting devices contributing to the interactive side of academic writing, the discourse constructed by Turkish L1 writers appeared to be slightly less interpersonal but highly authoritative overall. In contrast, the results suggested that the Turkish writers of English were similar to their English L1 counterparts in terms of building a significantly more cautious strategy for presenting knowledge claims and making use of relatively fewer boosting devices when presenting their claims. It is hoped that the implications of the findings can be useful for teaching of academic writing to postgraduates within the contexts of the study.


Keywords: Postgraduate academic writing, Metadiscourse, Hedges and boosters, Discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, Commitment and detachment

Metadiscourse markers (MMs) are lexical resources that writers use to organize their discourse and express their stance about the content or the reader. Metadiscourse analysis of Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials (PENE) has been conducted. The corpus of this study has contained 1000 editorials taken from four renowned Pakistani newspapers: Dawn News (DN), The Frontier (TF), The Express Tribune (TET) and The News (TN). The distribution of 250 editorials from each newspaper has been retrieved from online sources. The frequencies of metadiscourse features (MFs) have been counted and compared, and further studied metadiscourse features (MFs) functionally on the basis of propositional and non-propositional contents. A comprehensive model on Interpersonal metadiscourse has been proposed and it has been categorized into interactive and interactional markers. A comprehensive scheme of metadiscourse markers (MMs) has been proposed for the analysis of the present study. The findings revealed that all corpora used more interactive than interactional markers. In this regard, the sub-categories of interactive metadiscourse such as sequencing markers and transition markers have been frequently observed in the corpus of The Frontier (TF) as compared to other said corpora. The sub-categories of interactional metadiscourse such as engagement, and hedges have been frequently seen in the corpus of The Frontier (TF) as compared to other said corpora. In conclusion, this study has claimed that The Frontier (TF) is more reader-friendly because of the excessive use of interactive metadiscourse.
Keywords: interpersonal, interactive metadiscourse, interactional metadiscourse, Pakistani English Newspapers Editorials (PENE)

La relation entre l'éthique et la rhétorique, largement débattue par les philosophes et les rhétoriciens de l'Antiquité classique, est aussi l'un des thèmes principaux de la littérature égyptienne antique, particulièrement dans les fictions narratives dans lesquelles les pouvoirs du discours sont souvent mis en scène. Dans plusieurs œuvres littéraires du Moyen et du Nouvel Empire, la confrontation d'un personnage éloquent avec une situation nécessitant un jugement ou une appréciation morale pose le problème des possibles déviances que l'art du discours peut faire subir aux valeurs de la vérité-justice, la Maât. Par l'analyse d'œuvres telles que le Conte du Paysan éloquent ou le Conte de Vérité et Mensonge, une évolution peut être mise en évidence dans l'appréciation faite de la duplicité de la rhétorique : tandis que la littérature du Moyen Empire offre l'alternative d'une éloquence régulée par une norme qui lui soit propre, l'art du discours est présenté, au Nouvel Empire, comme totalement indépendant des valeurs qu'il véhicule. De manière générale, l'image littéraire de la rhétorique présentée par les auteurs égyptiens illustre leur conscience aiguë de la complexité des relations entre le discours et le réel.

Stance, or the writer’s expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication for the last three decades.  Notwithstanding this interest, and a more general curiosity concerning the gradual evolution of genres, very little is known of how stance in academic writing has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.  Our paper presents, and attempt to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit stance during this period.

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communit...

This thesis is a critically-oriented study of how knowledge and authority are legitimated in the discursive structure of popular management books. Some key textual and contextual properties of these texts are investigated in a corpus of over a hundred texts, representing a selection of highly influential works in this field according to emic criteria.

Five empirical studies assess different aspects of their structure, with a special attention to their role in the construction of authorial and reader personas: the nature of management book titles, that sets the pragmatic key for the understanding of these texts; the use of metadiscourse to set and answer genre expectations, shedding light on the reciprocal expectations of authors and readers; exemplification patterns, showing how persuasive texts can be deployed without developing general arguments; the use of narratives of personal experience to establish authorial credibility; and the strategic deployment of presuppositions to mobilize readers' affects and convictions in highly-charged topics.

The purpose of these studies is to provide a discursively-based account of the typical persuasive devices used by writers in popular management, illuminating the epistemic characteristics of the discipline. The analyses show the highly idiosyncratic character of popular management writing, that cannot be assimilated either to academic criteria nor to popularisation genres. The positioning of writers regarding their texts, their themes and their audience is understood as an expression of their position within the field of management, where several interests and sets of practitioners coincide. Its relation to the well-established ideological character of the
discipline is discussed, as is the value of textually-oriented discourse analysis for the critique of such ideologies.

The practice of translation in news journalism and in the production of media texts is a specific process that differs from the role translation plays in many other domains. Translation of fiction, as well as non-fiction, has traditionally been centred around the notion of equivalence between the source and target texts with a view to how specific forms, meanings and effects of the former can be appropriately rendered in the latter. News-related translation, however, is characterised by various kinds of textual transformations since the journalist translator usually uses the original text to construct a new text. Various forms of translational non-equivalence are hence the norm.
      This chapter provides a critical pragmatic analysis of translation shift in the area of news translation. It notes how these shifts can frame and perspectivize the news story. The text identifies four major areas where changes in translation tend to occur: (1) localization of the news content; (2) glossing translation through metadiscourse; (3) mistranslation in the news; and (4) fake translation. The chapter also discusses the recent trend of readers deconstructing official translations in such post-media discourse spaces as reader comments, which is a practice that constitutes a new form of participatory journalism.

Bilimsel metinlerin yansız ve kişi bildirmeyen yapılarla oluşturulduğu görüşü özellikle Hyland (2005)’in kişilerarası üstsöylem modeli ile eleştirilmiştir. Yazarlar önerme içeriğine ve okura bakış açılarını yansıtarak, kendilerini metin içinde açıkça kodlayarak ve okuru söylem katılımcısı olarak metne dahil ederek öznelliklerini göstermek amacıyla sıklıkla birtakım stratejiler kullanırlar. Bu stratejiler alıcı odaklı etkileşimli üstsöylem olarak adlandırılır. Birinci tekil ve çoğul kişi bu üstsöylemsel işlevleri yansıtmak için kullanılabilen dilsel birimlerdir. Bu çalışmanın amacı biyoloji ve dilbilim makale özetlerindeki birinci tekil ve çoğul kişi kullanımlarını ve bu dilsel birimlerin üstsöylemsel işlevlerini belirlemektir. Çalışmada 150 makale özetinden oluşan bir veritabanı (75 biyoloji özeti ve 75 dilbilim özeti) oluşturulmuş, birinci tekil ve çoğul kişi kullanımları belirlenmiş ve bu kullanımlar üstsöylem çerçevesinde sınıflandırılmıştır. Yapılan incelemeye göre biyoloji ve dilbilim makale özetlerindeki bu dilsel birimlerin sıklıkları ve üstsöylemsel işlevleri arasında farklılıklar olduğu bulgulanmıştır.

Metadiscourse is based on a view of writing as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways writers project them selves into their discourse to signal their understandings of their material and their audience. In this paper I explore how advanced second language writers deploy these resources in a corpus of 240 doctoral and masters dissertations totalling four million words.

This article outlines an agenda for critical discourse studies that reserves a place of honour for the notion of reflexivity. It draws on four concepts of reflexivity developed in the social sciences: reflexivity as a general feature of interaction and subjectivity; as a methodological praxis; as a property of discursive and non-discursive systems; and as a key feature of late modernity. Reflexivity is considered in terms of acts of interpretive movement. Social actors, organizations and systems throw reflexive loops around themselves, around others, as well as around spatial, temporal, linguistic, cognitive, social and historical dimensions of contextual reality. All social entities engage in the Sisyphean task of fixing social reality, trying to grasp it with a porous and amorphous semiotic net, shaping interpretive reality in the process. Reflexive loops can leave ripples on the surface of language and communication for others to pick up and engage with. Through metadiscursive acts, interlocutors can then engage with the meanings that fix who and what they are in an unequal and power-infused world whose boundaries can only be imagined through interpretive and critical praxis. Reflexivity is a precondition for the articulation of critique and should be considered as a key concept in the field of discourse studies. This paper is published as part of a collection on discourse studies.

In this interview, we celebrate the founding editor of Communication Theory, Prof. Robert T. Craig, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder. The interview took place in Craig’s office on May 28, 2013, under a framed and enlarged copy of Communication Theory’s original cover design. The first part of the interview focused on the creation of Communication Theory. Next, Craig used the conversation metaphor to capture the character of communication theorizing. He then discussed recent responses to his theoretical work and elaborated his rationale for moving toward empirical work at the intersection between communication theory and practical metadiscourse. Finally, he reflected on the challenges of teaching communication theory to undergraduate and graduate students.

Üstsöylem (metadiscourse), yazarların okuyucu ile ilişki kurmak için kullandıkları araçlardır. Bu araçlar; söylemi düzenlemeye, okuyucuyu metne dahil etmeye ve yazarın tutumunu okuyucuya aktarmaya yardım etmektedirler (Zarei, 2011). Bir söylemin ya da yazarın metnin içeriğine veya okuyucuya olan uzaklığını düzenlemek için kullanılan dilsel kaynaklardır (Hyland 2000). Bu bağlamda bu çalışmada Hyland (2005)'te ortaya konan üstsöylem modeli temel alınarak sosyal bilimler alanında yazılmış Türkçe bilimsel metinlerdeki üstsöylem belirleyicilerinin saptanması amaçlanmaktadır. Bu doğrultuda çalışmanın derlemi, ULAKBİM Sosyal Bilimler Veri Tabanında yer alan ve 2010-2015 yılları arasında yayımlanan süreli yayınlardan rastlantısal olarak seçilmiştir. İnceleme sonucunda Türkçe yazılan akademik metinlerde etkileşimli üstsöylem belirleyicilerinin kullanımının, çok az bir farkla etkileşimsel üstsöylem belirleyicileri kullanımından daha fazla olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Bu çalışmada incelenmiş olan bilimsel metinlerden elde sonuçlar, üstsöylem belirleyicilerinin farklı alanlarda farklı sıklıklarda kullanıldığını ve farklı alanların, farklı desenlemeler kullanma eğiliminde olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Abstract Metadiscourse is the tool that authors use to establish relationships with the reader. These tools help to organize discourse include the reader in the text and convey the author's attitude to the reader (Zarei, 2011).Metadiscourse is the linguistic source that a discourse or author uses to edit his/ her distance to the text or reader (Hyland 2000). In this context, it has been aimed to determine the metadiscourse markers used in Turkish scientific texts in the field of Social Sciences ased on the Metadiscourse Model presented in Hyland (2005) in this study. So the data base of the study has been selected randomly from the priodicals published in the ULAKBIM Social Sciences Review published between 2010 and 2015. As a result of the study it has been concluded that the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in academic texts written in Turkish is more than the use of ınteractive metadiscourse markers with a slight difference. The results obtained from the scientific texts examined in this study reveal that metadiscourse markers are sed at different frequencies and different fileds tend to use different patterns.

Research on intradisciplinary variations in self-mention marker use in research articles (RAs) in dentistry subdisciplines is lacking. The present study investigates self-mention markers used in each of the seven dentistry subdisciplines (oral sciences, periodontics, endodontics, pediatrics, prosthodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and orthodontics), sections of RAs that employ more self-mention devices in each of the seven dentistry subdisciplines, and common rhetorical realizations of first-person pronouns in the seven dentistry subdisciplines. The analytical framework was primarily based on Hyland’s (2003) four rhetorical functions of self-mentions in RAs. The findings showed the lack of qualitative and quantitative intradisciplinary variations across six of the seven dentistry subdisciplines. The first-person plural pronouns “we” and “our” were the most frequently employed self-mention devices in the Discussion section of RAs. Authors in the periodontics subdiscipline preferred to retain an objective stance through the use of passive constructions, abiding by the conventional norms of academic writing that restrict them. The findings also revealed that explaining a procedure and stating findings/claims were the most frequent realizations associated with the use of self-mention devices, with the exception of periodontics RAs that employed passive constructions instead. The findings contribute to the fields of discourse and genre studies as well as ESP/EAP courses. They may have implications for dentistry RA writing and teaching. An awareness of more frequently used self-mentions in dentistry RAs and their rhetorical functions can help English dentistry scholars successfully produce RAs in line with the academic writing norms of each subdiscipline.

The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental and inessential. Language, so the story goes, could get along perfectly well without them. The characteristics of language are independent of reflexive discourse — independent of how in metadiscourse we talk about language and its characteristics. This paper challenges this web of received opinion by asking: What might ‘first-order’ language be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it — that is, if there were no ‘second order’ metalinguistic practices? By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, the conclusion arrived at is that without ‘second-order’, reflexive properties, ‘first order’ language itself could not exist.  Language is essentially reflexive.

Du XIXe siècle à nos jours, de nombreux auteurs ont combiné l'écriture de création et une pratique de critique littéraire. Que l'on pense aux figures de Sainte-Beuve, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, François Nourissier ou encore Julia Kristeva : leurs oeuvres signalent toutes une partition plus ou moins explicite entre une production majeure ou principale et une oeuvre « résiduelle ». Au vu de la diversité des rapports revendiqués, perçus et imaginés entre la critique et la création, nous avons fait le choix de désigner notre objet comme les "figures du critique-écrivain", où « figures » peut s’entendre au triple sens identitaire, postural et rhétorique. Cet article propose de réfléchir aux formes et aux enjeux que prend la relation critique depuis l'institutionnalisation qu'elle connaît au XIXe siècle jusqu'aux formes plus récentes du commentaire littéraire.