The pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse – commentary on the ongoing discourse – is beginning to take its rightful place among the major topics of discourse studies. This book makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of metadiscourse, corpus-based methods of studying such phenomena, and our knowledge of metadiscourse use in written English. After comprehensively reviewing previous research, it introduces a more rigorous and empirical approach to metadiscourse studies. Ädel presents a new model of metadiscourse based on Jakobson's functions of language, and other conceptual tools, including explicit features for defining metadiscourse, a taxonomy of the functions it serves, and maps of the boundaries between it and related phenomena. A large-scale study of writing by L1 and L2 university students is presented, in which the L2 speakers' overuse of metadiscourse strongly marks them as lacking in communicative competence. This work is of interest both to linguists and to educators concerned with writing in English.

First released in 2005, Ken Hyland's Metadiscourse has become a canonical account of how language is used in written communication. 'Metadiscourse' is defined as the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. It is a key resource in language as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways and as such it is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book achieves for main goals: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers The book shows how writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. It shows how these tools help the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis and this book makes this a central goal.

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective, taking into account their linguistic repertoire and using ecologically valid classroom writing tasks in a longitudinal study. It tackles the issue of task-based language teaching from a multilingual perspective by presenting a study which takes place in natural classroom contexts where real classroom tasks are used to explore the interaction between languages in multilinguals. The book combines a focus on multilingual language development and pragmatics and discusses the resources multilingual learners take to the classroom.

Recent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersonal meaning, appraisal, stance and metadiscourse, frequently appear in cognitive-functional accounts, as well as historical and more applied approaches. These domains offer (partly) conflicting uses of 'intersubjectivity', differ in the overall scope of the concept and the phenomena it may cover.This book brings together contributions from a variety of different approaches, with the aim of disentangling the current web of intertwined notions of intersubjectivity. Rather than focusing on the potentially conflicting views, the volume aspires to resolve some of the conceptual puzzle by cross-fertilization between the different views, and spark discussion on how to operationalize 'intersubjectivity' in linguistic research. Originally published in English Text Construction 5:1 (2012).

This book is intended as a Festschrift to honour the work of David Banks, Emeritus Professor of the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France. The founder and former President of the Association Française de Linguistique Systémique Fonctionnelle, David Banks has been extremely active in bringing together linguists from different theoretical backgrounds in the study of both English and French. The volume includes papers in the three main fields in which he has published: namely, scientific writing, language change and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).

This volume presents a collection of research papers investigating how to foster the learning and teaching of pragmatic phenomena, as well as how to administer tests that assess pragmatic competence in second/foreign language education with regards to several target languages. The topics investigated include: speech acts; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; pragmatic, intercultural, and emotional competence; native and non-native performance; data collection and instructional methods; needs analysis; and syllabus design and materials development. The contributions will be of particular interest to linguists, language learners and teachers, teacher trainers, and communication experts.