Metadiscourse in written genres - Hedges, boosters, attitudinal markers, authorial stance - Causal markers - Expert corpora versus learner corpora - PhD theses, MA dissertations, undergraduate student essays, book reviews, business letters - Appraisal theory, Socially informed and process oriented models

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 edited book gives an updated overview of methods of analysis of academic and non-academic genres in a digital era. The advent of digital and social media has deeply transformed academic and non-academic communication practices in the past two decades. The linguistic landscape is now a multilayered one; multicultural issues and cross-linguistic aspects are addressed in a way to understand how linguistically and culturally diverse identities try to find pathways. The communicative immediacy of digital media and the spectrum of genres/hybridized forms now available has inevitably influenced the way we communicate and the way we create meaning-making in a multimodal environment. The book contains nine chapters divided into two main sections corresponding to academic and non-academic texts where written, spoken and digital genres are examined from different perspectives. Cross-linguistic studies, multilingual approaches or disciplinary variations are analyzed in detail. This book provides and up-to-date and innovative view of Metadiscourse research and develops new research methodologies, drawing on visual research methods and combinations of qualitative and quantitative approaches from fields including Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, and Genre Analysis.

In this book, a solid and emerging group of international researchers contributes to the theory of metadiscourse and to our understanding of the role metadiscourse and related ‘meta’ phenomena may play in digital forms of communication. Providing examples of new research methods and approaches, the authors investigate progressively hybridized academic and non-academic genres that have migrated from analogue to digital format. The book offers valuable insights on how digital communication has changed today’s communication environments and provides examples of research methods needed to capture that change. This volume will be appreciated by scholars and graduate students interested in linguistics, corpus linguistics and metadiscourse.

This book is about metadiscourse, the rhetorical acts used by authors as they talk with readers in order to guide rather than inform them and build solidarity. Metadiscourse in use is illustrated by a variety of written texts spanning the period from 500 B.C. to the present. Perspectives from rhetoric, speech communication, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and psychology are used to begin building a theory of metadiscourse. The theory is tested with two empirical studies having practical classroom applications: a descriptive analysis of metadiscourse use in social studies school and non-school texts and an experimental study of the effects of metadiscourse on students' learning and attitudes.

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.