The semantics and pragmatics of metadiscourse

This paper argues against standard views of academic metadiscourse [Hyland, Ken, 1998. Persuasion and context: the pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 437-455; Hyland, Ken, 1999. Talking to students: metadiscourse in introductory coursebooks. English for Specific Purposes 18, 3-26; Vande Kopple, William J., 1985. Some explanatory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication 36, 82-93; Vande Kopple, William J., 1988. Metadiscourse and the recall of modality markers. Visible Language 22, 233-272] which treat metadiscourse as essentially linked to non-propositional, rhetorical, stylistic, peripheral, or secondary aspects of interpretation. I redefine metadiscourse on theoretically justified grounds as either inter-textual or intra-textual. In inter-textual cases, other texts (by other authors or by the author herself at another time) are drawn upon within a single text (e.g., 'There have been reports of …', 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has recommended that …'); in intra-textual cases, reference is made to other parts of the same text (or to the author herself) (e.g., 'the questions that I want to consider are …', 'I shall presently return to this point in some detail'). Drawing both on authentic (linguistic and medical) examples and on experimental evidence, I argue, using the framework of Relevance Theory [Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford; Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 2004. Relevance theory. In: Ward, G., Horn, L.R. (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 607-632], that (a) at the semantic level, metadiscourse may contribute to the propositional content of utterances and (b) at the pragmatic level, metadiscourse is indispensable to the effective interpretation of academic discourse.