خلاصة:
This study investigated personal metadiscourse units across genres. Based on Ädel’s (2006) taxonomy of the discourse functions of personal metadiscourse and Leech’s (2014) grand strategy of politeness, three spoken genres were compared in terms of the use of personal metadiscourse functions and politeness maxims. To that end, a 3,034,025-word corpus consisting of Panel discussion in politics, Interviews with actors, and Comedies genres, which included 30 audio and video transcriptions, was developed. Explicitness, world of discourse, current discourse, speaker qua speaker and listener qua listener were used to identify metadiscourse units. We examined the total frequencies of all personal metadiscourse units used in the corpus. The results of corpus analysis showed that 19.6% of metadiscourse units occurred in comedies, which was the highest among the three genres. The most commonly used metadiscourse units appeared in speaker-oriented metadiscourse with 10.2% in interviews. The results also revealed that in panel discussion the speakers focused more on their own ideas than the listeners or participants. Results of chi-square analysis showed that English speakers used speaker-oriented, participant-oriented, and listener-oriented metadiscourse types statistically significantly differently. A statistically significant difference between speaker-, participant-, and listener-oriented units was found. Results also revealed that speakers in different genres are willing to use such maxims as opinion reticence and modesty more frequently than other maxims. The paper concludes with proposing a new model for analyzing metadiscourse.
ملخص الجهاز:
Metadiscourse and Politeness Principle Emerging out of concepts such as sequencers and topicalizers (Williams, 1981), illocution markers (Vande Kopple, 1985), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2001), attitude (Halliday, 1985), epistemic modality (Hyland, 1998), appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) and stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989; Hyland & Guinda, 2012), metadiscourse “reveals the ways that writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the propositional content and the audience of the text” (Hyland & Tse, 2004, p.
On the other hand, the current study aims to apply the PP and its maxims to the analysis of three spoken genres, namely, Panel discussion in politics, Interview with actors, and Comedies to show how it functions in face-to-face interaction since dialogue, different from monologue in nature, is believed to be a reflection of interaction.
With regards to the second genre, interviews with actors, a quick look at Table 7 shows that M8 (opinion reticence), M3 (approbation), and M4 (modesty) were the most frequent maxims in speaker-oriented units followed by M2 (tact), M7 (agreement), M1 (generosity), M9 (sympathy), M10 (feeling reticence), M5 (obligation of S to O), and finally M6 (obligation of O to S).
Table 5 Distribution of PP Maxims: Panel Discussion in Politics (per 1,000 words(View the image of this page) As for the third genre, comedies, we examined the distribution of maxims of PP observed in the three functions of speaker-, participant- and listener-oriented units.