105 / 2018-07-29 17:52:01

“The fact that…”: Interpersonal interaction of metadiscursive nouns in academic discourse ——Comparative study on native English and Chinese writers

metadiscursive nouns,academic discourse,complement structure,interpersonal interaction

全体主题 > 学术与职业英语的教学与研究

Metadiscoursive nouns (such as fact, analysis), which refer to the organization of discourse and writer’s understanding of it, have raised researchers’ attention in recent years. They are frequently utilized in academic discourse to encapsulate chunk of information and make prediction on what is going to present. However, a spate of interest has been distributed to their function in constructing cohesive discourse by reviewing or previewing information. Less discussed is the interpersonal interaction made by metadicursive nouns employed by scholars from different cultures. In this paper, we explore interpersonal function (for example, stance construction) of metadiscursive nouns present in “metadicursive nouns+ that complement” structure with 60 research articles written by Chinese and English writers.
After building a corpora that consists of cleaned up academic discourse, we will tag the corpora using TreeTaggar and search for N Complement Structures in concordance software AntConc. We selected all the searched and categorize concordances in terms of function classification of metadiscursive nouns established by Jiang & Hyland (2015). Frequencies and different structural appearance would be compared in Chinese and English writers.
The results reveal that Chinese writers tend to use less nouns of almost each category to construct discourse due to their inadequacies of English knowledge and the following of local academic community. Native writers show preference to use nouns of quality to enhance their propositions and win credibility for the research using positive quality nouns. Furthermore, some pedagogical implications can be applied to L2 academic writing.