2.2 The Definition of Metadiscursive Nouns
Although the term “metadiscursive noun,” which is not new in academia, was adopted by Francis (1986) as a substitute term for “anaphoric nouns” and by Tahara (2014) as a way of creating textual cohesion, they never stuck to the use of the term. They failed to provide a comprehensive and overall map of “metadiscursive nouns,” either neglecting the dual function or providing an unpersuasive inclusion of it.
Jiang and Hyland (2016, 2017) and Jiang (2017, 2019) were the pioneering scholars who explored metadiscursive nouns systematically, and they provided a clear and over-all map about metadiscursive nouns, either dipping into the most frequent lexico-grammar patterns in academic writings from a corpus-based perspective or trying to classify metadiscursive nouns more comprehensively according to their functions. Based on the co-work of Jiang and Hyland (2017), Jiang (2019) officially put forward the definition of “metadiscursive nouns” in his academic article “Metadiscourse Nouns: A New Perspective on Interpersonal Interaction Studies.” With the proposal and taxonomy of metadiscourse of Hyland (2005), he introduced a two-dimension structure of the “interactive” and “interactional” of metadiscursive nouns, emphasizing their dual rhetoric functions and providing a more comprehensive functional framework for further study of noun resources. He made a great contribution to complementing the systematic exploration of the roles of noun resources in textual construction and interaction. Jiang and Hyland (2017) explored the interactive and interactional use of metadiscursive nouns. They developed a rhetorically-based classification of these types of nouns, complementing another critical element to metadiscourse, which offers writers a way of organizing discourse into a cohesive flow of information and of constructing a stance towards it.
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework ......................... 18
3.1 Hyland’s Model of Metadiscourse .................................. 18
3.1.1 The Overview of Metadiscourse ...................... 18
3.1.2 Hyland’s Classification of Metadiscourse .................... 19
Chapter Four Research Methodology ......................... 27
4.1 Research Questions ......................... 27
4.2 Data and Corpora Information ............................. 27
4.3 Research Tools ............................ 29
Chapter Five Results and Discussion .............................. 32
5.1 Overall Distributions of Metadiscursive Nouns ............................. 32
5.2 A Comparison Between CANW and CACW ............................. 34
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
5.1 Overall Distributions of Metadiscursive Nouns
The author combined CANW and CACW, in the first place, as a whole and retrieved metadiscursive nouns with the Regular Expressions (Jiang, 2017) to see the overall realizations of metadiscursive nouns practiced by two groups of writers. Table 5.1 shows the frequency of metadiscursive nouns in the two corpora.
Totally 26,930 metadiscursive nouns in the five lexico-grammatical patterns in the two copora as a whole, shown in Table 5.1, were identified according to the definition of metadiscursive nouns proposed by Jiang (2016, 2017)
