Journal
JOURNAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING
Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 133-151Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jslw.2004.02.001
Keywords
disciplinary interactions; metadiscourse; L2 postgraduate
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Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this paper, I explore how advanced second language writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre. The paper examines the purposes and distributions of metadiscourse in a corpus of 240 doctoral and masters dissertations totalling four million words written by Hong Kong students. The paper proposes a model of metadiscourse as the interpersonal resources required to present propositional material appropriately in different disciplinary and genre contexts. The analysis suggests how academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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