1 Literature Review
1.1The Previous Researches on Metadiscourse
Before getting to know the definition of metadiscourse, we first need todistinguish it from the term discourse markers which shares a close relationship and anambiguous definition with metadiscourse. Thus it is necessary to have a clearknowledge of the two concepts for the precise pision of the following research.Fraser (1999) made a coherent and fruitful statement of what discourse markersare and defined them as a class of lexical expressions drawn primarily from thesyntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. With certainexceptions, they signal a relationship between the interpretation of the segment theyintroduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1. They could stand for a central concretemeaning, but represent during the process, which can not simply be defined asconceptual. Though discourse markers do not perform propositional functions but itsdecisive roles are still inneglectable. While it is acknowledged that metadiscourse istypically employed to represent the writer’s standpoint towards the content or thereaders, or to organize the logical structure of the discourse, which may have little todo with the discourse topic but is essential for readers to understand the prepositional content as a whole. As a result, both discourse markers and metadiscourse arenon-topical but function as part of the procedural to make the discourse cohesive andunderstandable.However, there are also great differences between discourse markers andmetadiscourse. Discourse markers play as a connection role for the segments of asentence and their interpretation is negotiated by the context, both linguistic andconceptual. Scholars have put forward its analysis through “phonological, semantic,syntactic, functional, social and stylistic angles to see its features” (Xu, 2010:266).Apart from that, it is also hard to unify the boundaries of the definition of discoursemarkers as well as the meanings they exist. While metadiscourse is the words thatwriters or speakers employ to project themselves into the discourse by signaling outtheir attitudes towards the content and the audience of the text. This kind ofintervention may not undermine the subject topic but the genre and the narration couldundergo a great transformation. Besides, metadiscourse is a scientific and clearterminology which contains large branches of markers such as commentaries,punctuations and even sequence of sentences which discourse markers do not have.
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1.2The Previous Researches on the Use of Metadiscourse in News
The use of metadiscourse has attracted the attention of more and more scholars athome and abroad across multiple disciplines. And in recent years, their focus has turninto news media. Therefore various researches concerning metadiscourse in news hasbeen done in which some are fixed on a single genre or a certain language and othersare concerned about the comparative studies of two languages or two different styles.Elisabeth Le (2004) who adopts the mode by Hyland and Tse, analyzes how theelite France newspaper Le Monde, constructs active participation within its editorial’sargumentation to establish its authority through the study of the three metadiscursivecategories. The corpus covers all the editorials on Russia that were published by LeMonde in the period between August 1999 and March 2000, a total of 20 editorials.The result suggests that “metadiscourse devices differ within argumentative discoursebetween genres, that the concept of audience needs to be refined theoretically, and that the construction of an active participation in the argumentation establishes Le Monde’sauthority.”Another research on editorial is made by Dafouz (2008) who takes a further stepby comparing editorials of two cultures. The study is based on a corpus of 40 opinioncolumns, 20 written in English and 20 in Spanish, from The Times and El Paisrespectively. Findings indicates that both English and Spanish editorials exist textualand interpersonal metadiscourse markers but there are variations as to the distributionand composition of such markers, specifically in the case of certain textual categories.To make the text persuasive and reader-oriented, considering the persuasive effects ofmetadiscourse, it is necessary to balance the number of textual and interpersonalmarkers.
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2 Methodology
2.1 Research Questions
The purpose of the present study is to conduct a comparative analysis of the useof metadiscourse in English news reporting and English news commentaries so as tocontribute some material for the study of metadiscourse as a whole, at the same time,serve as a referential for news writing. As a result, the paper is going to discuss thefollowing problems:
(1) What are the features of English news reporting and English newscommentaries in applying metadiscourse respectively?
(2) What are the similarities and differences between English news reportingand English news commentaries in applying metadiscourse?
(3) What enlightenment can we get?
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2.2 Data Collection and Corpus
All the news reporting and commentaries are selected from the official website ofPulitzer Prize to make sure the authenticity andstandardization of the language. The data is saved in plain text in two corpuses.The corpus is made up of 60 texts with 30 English news commentaries, 30English news reporting for the objective of the final results. All of the reporting andcommentaries are collected from all the winning works from 2009 to 2012 because ofthe need of the amount. Since metadiscourse covers word, punctuation and visualaspects (Xu, 2010), which all have certain influence on readers, but the researchconcerning all those three might be too much and can not be specifically narrated inthis single paper. Therefore, considering of the length of the present paper, the authorchooses to focus on word metadiscourse, which represents the characteristic of the useof metadiscourse and are mostly favored by writers.For the reliance of the results and the convenience of the study, the number of thenews reporting and commentary is 30 respectively. The reporting corpus has 59,990English words with an average 1,200 words per text while the commentary corpuspossesses 26,460 English words with an average 882 words per article.
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2 Methodology ..........21
2.1 Research Questions ..........21
2.2 Data Collection and Corpus..........21
2.3 Data Analysis Methods..........22
3 Results and Discussion ..........23
3.1 Statistical Results of Metadiscourse in Two Corpora ..........23
3.2 Similarities in the Use of Metadiscourse in English News..........27
3.3 Differences in the Use of Metadiscourse ..........33
3.4 Discussions ............43
3 Results and Discussion
3.1 Statistical Results of Metadiscourse in Two Corpora
Generally speaking, the outcome of the use of metadiscourse in both Englishnews reporting and English news commentary is not that the same. Interactiveresources is much more frequently applied in English news reporting than interactionalresources with the number of 2425 to 377 while in commentary the gap is much moreclose with the number of 907 to 679. The two tables below are the detailed statistics ofthe two genres (see table3-1 and table3-2). While the rest metadiscourses share little quotient in Englishnews reporting: frame marker (2.4%) run the third place, code glosses (1.0%) andendophoric markers (0.1%) are seldom used comparing with the others. As forinteractional resources, the most frequently applied is hedges but only 7.2%, while thewords of boosters (2.6%) and engagement markers (2.5%) are almost being used thesame, which rank as the second and the third place. The least used of interactionalmarkers are self-mention and attitude markers with 0.7% and 0.5% respectively.It is obvious that interactive resources are far more favored by writers thaninteractional resources in English news reporting which leads us to wonder what hascaused such a huge data gap. News reporting, clearly, is about reporting events thathappened around the world in an objective way without the need of the reporters’personal judgments; on the contrary, interactional resources are usually employed bywriters to conduct interaction by intruding and commenting on their message (Hyland,2008: 49), which explains the bare use of interactional resources in news reporting.
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Conclusion
Part 3 has discussed the examples and statistics which can help us contribute toanswer the questions put forward at the beginning of the thesis. Benefit from that, weconclude the major findings to answer the questions. According to the data, both English news reporting and commentary use a lot ofmetadiscourse markers, which indicates the determinate roles that metadiscourse playsin an English news text and that no matter what style it is, metadiscourse is needed toconnect the contents inside as well as the readers outside.2The findings prove that similarities and differences both exist in the applicationof metadisourse in English news reporting and commentary. Since the two corporabelong to the same language system, writers’ basic writing habits are similar, thus theoverall use of metadiscourse per 10,000 words does not fluctuate that much.However, the data for the two subcategories differ greatly. In terms of interactivemarkers, transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers all share similar portions ofmetadiscourse between the two texts except evidentials that are more frequentlyapplied in English news reporting. Below are the author’s general conclusions of thosephenomenons.
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Reference (omitted)