This book constitutes the first systematic analysis of meta-discourse in the spoken domain, addressing the question of how, why, and when speakers switch from discourse to meta-discourse by means of comment clauses (e.g., ‘I think’). The case of Present-day Italian is considered, exploring the internal properties of comment clauses (e.g., morphosyntax and semantics of the verb), their relations with the surrounding discourse (e.g., position of comment clause), and their prosodic profiles. This study shows that speakers recur to meta-discourse to convey a non-random set of functions, having mainly to do with the online process of reference construction (e.g., approximation and reformulation) and with the degree of speaker’s commitment (e.g., epistemicity and emphasis). Comment clauses are also used as attention-getting or topic-resuming devices, though less frequently. One of the most interesting results of this study is the identification of a close relation between meta-discourse and stance-taking in spoken domain, with speakers recurring to comment clauses to convey their attitude. Finally, meta-discourse turns out to be highly influenced, if not constrained, by universal properties of the spoken domain (i.e., non-linearity).

This title studies spoken metadiscourse in two academic genres in the engineering field, the lecture and the peer seminar. It examines what motivates metadiscourse and how engineering academics resort to different types of metadiscourse when they address different audiences.

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.

Shows how a person's first language and culture influence writing in a second language.

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.