Revisiting metadiscourse: Conceptual and methodological issues concerning signalling nouns

Abstract

The concept of metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers\ninteract through their use of language with readers and listeners (also referred\nto as metalanguage and metapragmatics) – has received considerable attention\nin applied linguistics in recent years, particularly in the study of academic\ndiscourse. Conceptualised within the applied linguistics context of developing\noptimal descriptions of genres as a basis for a genre-based pedagogy, this\narticle first reviews some of the different approaches to metadiscourse,\nhighlighting how the concept is construed in different ways by different\nresearchers. The article then discusses a number of problematic issues in\nmetadiscourse research: metadiscourse as textual or interpersonal; the size of\nthe linguistic unit in metadiscourse research; the multi-functionality of\nmetadiscourse items; and the issue of representativeness in corpus research on\nmetadiscourse. The second part of the article focuses on the concept of\nsignalling nouns (SNs) (abstract nouns which carry particular pragmatic\nmeanings in discourse), a feature of discourse not usually included under the\nrubric of metadiscourse. It is argued, however, that SNs represent an\nimportant resource for making writers’ (or speakers’) intended meanings clear.\nIn this second part of the article, a first section introduces the notion of SN\nand a second section discusses how SNs might be incorporated into a model\nof metadiscourse. A final section of the paper concludes with a summary and\nsome comments on pedagogic application

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