Selected Metadiscourse Markers in Academic Writing: Exploring the Distribution in the BAWE Corpus

Abstract

The study of metadiscourse markers is central to this thesis, based on the insights and framework embraced by Hyland who is a pioneer in this discipline. Metadiscourse is understood as an approach in which a writer or a speaker adopts to project himself or herself in the discourse, which itself is his or her creation. It indicates the attitude of the content creator towards his or her content as well as the intended consumer of the discourse. This has made metadiscourse an extremely popular tool for investigators whose research area of interest span from social construction to functional orientation to discourse as well by scientists who perform corpus analysis. The metadiscourse approach provides an attractive mechanism to investigate patterns of interaction and cohesion across the content of a discourse in corpus-based analysis. As a concept and philosophical paradigm, the study on metadiscourse markers offers an approach of accumulating under a single heading a series of tools that creators intelligently utilize in order to clearly format their texts, connect with their intended audience and indicate their behavior. These markers also show the attitude of the author towards both the discourse and the consumer of the discourse.