英语语言学学术论文中元话语名词的人际互动功能探讨

.  Of  the  two  corpora  with  tokens  of 622,505,  which  were  retrieved  with  Regular  Expression  (Jiang,  2017)  in  the  five  lexico-grammatical patterns, metadiscursive nouns account for approximately 4.33%, with an average frequency  of  433  cases  per  10,000  words  and  337  cases  in  each  article,  indicating  that metadiscursive  nouns  are  considerably  prevalent  in  English  linguistic  academic  articles  and they play a significantly important role delivering scientific claims and interacting with readers. 

Chapter Six Conclusion

6.1 Major Findings

Through  a  comparative  study  on  the  interpersonal  functions  of  metadiscursive  nouns between CANW and CACW, differences as well as similarities between native English writers and Chinese writers have been discovered, and they are summarized as follows:

Firstly, we can draw the conclusion from the overall occurrences that metadiscursive nouns are greatly pervasive in English linguistic academic writings and they play a very important role  as  cohesive  linkage  of  discourse  and  as  an  essential  channel  for  expressing  stance  and engagement, accounting for 432 cases per 10,000 words. This shows that metadiscursive nouns are significantly critical in academic writer-reader interaction. However, metadiscursive nouns distribute unevenly in the five lexico-grammatical patterns, with the determiner + N pattern appearing the most frequently and the determiner + be + N the least frequently. 

Secondly, there are some similarities concerning the application of metadiscursive nouns between  English  native  writers  and  Chinese  writers:  (1)  Both  English  native  writers  and Chinese  writers  are  inclined  to  employ  metadiscursive  nouns  as  interpersonal  interaction strategy in their articles with high frequencies of 430.7 and 443.3 of per 10,000 words; (2) The two corpora are consistent in the results that metadiscursive nouns are not evenly used with the five lexico-grammatical patterns. The determiner + N pattern is used most frequently, followed by the N + post-nominal clause pattern. The There be + N pattern, N + be + complement clasue pattern, and determiner + be + N pattern are relatively less used by both two groups of writers; (3) In the interactive dimension, both corpora retrieved overwhelming frequency of anaphoric uses of metadiscursive nouns over cataphoric uses, with only 2.5 cases in CANW and 3.3 ones in  CACW  every  10,000  words  within  the  determiner  +  N  pattern;  (4)  In  the  interactional dimension,  we  conclude  from  the  findings  that  the  frequency  of  stance  expression  is  much higher than that of engagement in both CANW and CACW. 

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