Metadiscursive Nouns

Interaction and Persuasion in Disciplinary Writing

Feng (Kevin) Jiang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000598216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Based on a 1.7-million-word corpus of 160 research articles from both soft and hard knowledge fields, this book sets out to explore how a particular type of noun – namely, the metadiscursive noun – is rhetorically used to mediate writer-reader interaction in disciplinary writing.

Analysts of academic discourse have come to regard hedges, reporting verbs, directives and so on as forming part of a wide repertoire of interactive features available to authors, suggesting a variety of terms, including evaluation, stance, appraisal, and metadiscourse. One aspect which has been less fully explored, however, is the rhetorical role nouns play in achieving writers' persuasive goals. This book fills the gap by proposing a particular type of nouns as metadiscursive nouns (as in "this supports our hypotheses that youth are more likely to co-offend when neighbourhoods are less disadvantaged"). The author aims to find out how writers employ metadiscursive nouns to engage and interact with readers in academic prose, raising theoretical and pedagogical implications and how they can be applied in the teaching of academic writing.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in the areas of English for academic purposes, corpus studies, academic writing, and linguistics in general.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/b22893-1

This chapter begins by introducing the ever-growing research interest in academic writing and discussing the constructionist view taken by this study, which sees academic writing as a social interaction with meaning constructed between writer and reader. Metadiscursive nouns are focalised in this study, as I will begin by illustrating their relevance to textual interaction before coming to the aim and research questions. After that, the motivation and significance of this research will be discussed in terms of linguistic analysis and its backwash effects on the teaching of English for academic purposes (EAP) and academic writing. In the end, the outline of the book will be given as a preview for what this study covers.

1.1 Background to this research

The recent two decades or so have seen a profusion of applied linguistics research on academic writing, inspired either by an interest in its language features or a quest for pedagogical effectiveness. This strand of research has given us insights into writing in the disciplines and the way that discipline produces knowledge, presents arguments and talks to readers. Academic writing was once considered “a transparent transmitter of natural facts” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 14). In this simplistic view, academic writing is an objective and impersonal kind of discourse, and “the only means of communication for true knowledge would be the mathematical symbol, verifiable, unchanging, eternal” (Manuel et al., 1979, p. 471). However, academic writers cannot simply report what research has been done and list what results have been obtained since understanding and interpretation of data or the “mathematical symbol” are not adequately self-evident. On the contrary, they are dependent both on the assumptions that scientists bring to the problem and the ways that academic scholars argue for their claims (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Hyland, 2004; Hyland & Jiang, 2021).

As Prelli (1989, p. 100) has noted,

[L]ogic and experimentation are not the fundamental means of securing scientific change. They are efficacious only if applied persuasively (italics in original). Scientific advancement is the result of dynamic and interdependent relationships between scientists’ efforts at persuasion and adjudication by audiences in actual and specific, temporal and physical situations.

Successful academic texts, therefore, are built not simply on the writers’ plausible inscription of external reality but perhaps more importantly on the way authors rhetorically formulate their interpretations to the expectations of their readers (Bamford & Bondi, 2005; Nystrand, 1989). Therefore, all reporting occurs in a disciplinary context and argumentations depend on “what the mind allows the eye to see” (Jiang & Hyland, 2016, p. 2).

A more constructivist view sees academic writing as a persuasive endeavour, saturated with the perspectives of the author. Writers step into texts to organise discourse flow, predict possible objections from readers and guide them to particular interpretations. The dialogic interaction in texts has been likened to “ballroom dancing” (Hoey, 2001) where each party builds sense from the interaction by anticipating what the other is likely to do. Thus authors not only write something meaningful and creative of “news value” (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995, p. 28) but also project a professionally competent stance which readers are most likely to find familiar, plausible and persuasive. This interaction helps writers to “galvanise support, express collegiality, resolve difficulties, and negotiate disagreement through patterns of rhetorical choices” that show their affect and care about the readers (Hyland, 2011, p. 195).

In other words, knowledge claims for the novelty and significance of research have to be balanced against the convictions and expectations of disciplinary readers, taking care of their background knowledge, comprehending needs and likely objections. This requires a writer to produce a cohesive flow of discourse which turns out coherent meanings to readers and to take a position towards materials which connect with readers in a plausible and persuasive way. All these constructivist conceptions of academic writing can be recapitulated in Hyland’s (2013, p. 62) plenary note:

[T]he linguistic resources we unreflectively choose when we present our arguments locate us in our disciplines: they present us as competent, credible insiders and allow us to engage with other insiders, anticipating the actual or potential voices and views of our readers.

These linguistic resources are always drawn on to navigate our teaching of academic writing and EAP. They have been studied in the literature from a different variety of approaches, including stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989; Charles, 2003; Hyland, 2005b), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000; Hyland & Diani, 2009), voice (Fløttum et al., 2006; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007), cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Hoey, 1979), engagement (Hyland, 2005b; Hyland & Jiang, 2016; Jiang & Ma, 2018), appraisal (Martin, 2000; Martin & White, 2005) and metadiscourse (Crismore, 1989; Hyland, 2005a; Vande Kopple, 1985). However, the range of means by which writers set up interaction and negotiate knowledge claims with readers suggests that these features hardly exhaust the interactive nature and dynamics embedded in academic writing and also implies that our knowledge of writers’ linguistic repertoire and of how these resources shape writer-reader interaction in academic writing is still incomplete. Therefore, new studies are warranted and motivated in light of examining other means and strategies that writers employ to interact with the audience in texts.

The current research sets out in this direction to study a type of nouns named “metadiscursive nouns” (such as fact, assumption, problem, extent, reason. Please see detailed accounts in Chapter 4) as a rhetorical device constitutive of writer-reader interaction in academic writing. Here is an example.¹

Example 1.1

According to this paradigm, early stage species would spread predominantly via spore dispersal in young and disturbed habitats.²

[Medicine]

In this example, an evidential marker according to, the so-called metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a; Vande Kopple, 1985) indicates the source of information, to guide the reader’s interpretation. In this case, the author is likely to regard readers’ possible processing needs for making the current discourse more obviously relevant to the information presented earlier. As a result, this metadiscourse was used to “make additional ideational material salient and aid reader’s recovery of the writer’s meanings, facilitating comprehension and supporting arguments by referring to earlier material or anticipating something yet to come” (Hyland, 2005a, p. 51).

We can, however, also see here an additional aspect of metadiscourse in the noun phrase this paradigm. This serves to both remind readers of an aforementioned analytical approach and offer the writer’s interpretation of that approach. It thus exhibits the writer’s decision to engage with the reader at this point by (a) assisting comprehension through linking parts of the text cohesively and (b) conveying a stance towards what is being discussed. Paradigm here is one example of metadiscursive nouns which point to material information somewhere inside or outside current texts for their full referent content and set an evaluative frame of how to interpret the content. This metadiscourse-like function helps to create a cohesive flow of information which turns out coherent meanings, showing the way that the writer intrudes in and guides audiences through the text when and where needed. The following is a longer example.

Example 1.2

There are also differences regarding the types of Bathroom Formulas that receive these kinds of responses. Acknowledgements typically occur after the ‘milder’, neutral or euphemistic types (84% of the acknowledgements (21 of 25) followed such instances), while jokes instead follow potentially more face-threatening dysphemisms or euphemistic dysphemisms (62%, 8 of 13). (This difference between acknowledgements and jokes was statistically significant (p < 0. 05).) This is in line with Bardovi-Harlig’s (2012, p. 214) suggestion that the choice of formula relates to speakers’ expectations about how listeners will respond.

[Applied linguistics]

In this longer example, there are only three sentences but six cases of metadiscursive nouns (differences, responses, instances, difference, suggestion and expectations), with nearly two instances of metadiscursive nouns in each sentence. They are used to channel the author’s stepping into their texts and also show his efforts to steer readers’ comprehension of the statistical numbers and the related discussions. Mathematical numbers are not so self-evident and transparent that readers may not find it easy to grasp the relationship between these numbers and their connection with surrounding information. Mindful of the readers’ processing needs, the author used differences, responses, difference, suggestion and expectations to interweave the ongoing discourse with preceding and succeeding information in the production of a cohesive and coherent text.

Differences, suggestion and expectations cataphorically preview the coming proposition while the rest three anaphorically review the prior information. By using differences as a preview, the author probably tries to signal to readers that I am going to show you the contrast between acknowledgements and jokes by a set of statistic, which prepares readers for a contrasting clause relation to follow and eases their processing difficulty of the relationships between acknowledgements and jokes in the upcoming information and data. Similarly, responses is used as a reminder helping readers recover what has been mentioned previously. It may refer back far to the replies in question two paragraphs ago granting permission (We’ll let you do that), questions for confirmation (You need the toilet?) and hearers stating the same intention as the speaker (Well I should go too). This is a necessary reminder that helps to develop a cohesive and coherent string of texts and slackens readers’ memory ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Review of related concepts
• 3 Metadiscursive nouns
• 4 Methodology
• 5 Overall results: Frequency, distribution and wordlist
• 6 Interactive function: Anaphoric and cataphoric cohesion
• 7 Interactional function: Stance and engagement
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Journal list
• Appendix 2 TreeTagger tagset
• Appendix 3 An illustration of the typical nouns in each category in the corpus
• Index