خلاصة:
This essay focuses on metadiscourse, a name for elements of texts that convey meanings other than those that are primarily referential. The essay provides some theoretical background to the study of metadiscourse, briefly reviews a taxonomy of metadiscourse, and explores four reasons why the study of metadiscourse is interesting and important: (a) Such study shows how intricately structured language is; (b) Such study opens up intriguing questions about ethics and language use; (c) Such study reveals differences in how metadiscourse is used in similar texts in different languages; (d) And such study provides reasons why metadiscourse deserves a special place in second-language instruction.
ملخص الجهاز:
The essay provides some theoretical background to the study of metadiscourse, briefly reviews a taxonomy of metadiscourse, and explores four reasons why the study of metadiscourse is interesting and important: (a) Such study shows how intricately structured language is; (b) Such study opens up intriguing questions about ethics and language use; (c) Such study reveals differences in how metadiscourse is used in similar texts in different languages; (d) And such study provides reasons why metadiscourse deserves a special place in second-language instruction.
In other words, Halliday (1973) asserts that people communicate with messages that are integrated expressions of three different kinds of meaning, which he calls ideational, interpersonal, and textual.
Linguistic elements that convey ideational meaning "are concerned with the content of language, its function as a means of the expression of our experience, both of the external world and of the inner world of our own consciousness" (Halliday, 1973, p.
Interpersonal metadiscourse helps writers express their personalities, reveal their evaluations of and attitudes toward ideational material, show what role in the communication situation they are choosing, and indicate how they hope readers will respond to the ideational material.
On the levels of metadiscourse, we do not expand ideational material but help our readers connect, organize, interpret, evaluate, and develop attitudes toward that material.
4. Epistemology Markers: Several kinds of metadiscourse are linked in the overarching function of indicating some stance on our part toward the epistemological status of the ideational material we convey.