Metadiscursive Nouns (China Perspectives)

✍ Scribed by Feng (Kevin) Jiang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 235
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Based on a 1.7-million-word corpus of 160 research articles from both soft and hard knowledge fields, this book sets out to explore how a particular type of noun – namely, the metadiscursive noun – is rhetorically used to mediate writer-reader interaction in disciplinary writing.

Analysts of academic discourse have come to regard hedges, reporting verbs, directives and so on as forming part of a wide repertoire of interactive features available to authors, suggesting a variety of terms, including evaluation, stance, appraisal, and metadiscourse. One aspect which has been less fully explored, however, is the rhetorical role nouns play in achieving writers’ persuasive goals. This book fills the gap by proposing a particular type of nouns as metadiscursive nouns (as in “this supports our hypotheses that youth are more likely to co-offend when neighbourhoods are less disadvantaged”). The author aims to find out how writers employ metadiscursive nouns to engage and interact with readers in academic prose, raising theoretical and pedagogical implications and how they can be applied in the teaching of academic writing.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in the areas of English for academic purposes, corpus studies, academic writing, and linguistics in general.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
List of Boxes
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Background to this research
1.2 Aim and research questions of this research
1.3 Motivation and significance
1.3.1 Motivation of this study
1.3.2 Significance and contributions
1.4 Overview of the book
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Review of related concepts
2.1 Container nouns
2.2 General nouns
2.3 Anaphoric nouns
2.4 Labelling nouns
2.5 Carrier nouns
2.6 Shell nouns
2.7 Signalling nouns
2.8 Others
2.8.1 Deverbal nouns
2.8.2 Enumerable nouns
2.8.3 Vocabulary 3
2.8.4 Metalanguage nouns
2.9 Applied research in academic discourse
2.10 Summary
Note
References
Chapter 3: Metadiscursive nouns
3.1 Definition
3.2 Discoursal features
3.2.1 Lexical vagueness
3.2.2 Nominalisation
3.3 Selection criteria
3.4 Lexico-grammatical patterns
3.4.1 Anaphoric and cataphoric framings
3.4.2 Evaluative potentials
3.5 Rhetorical functions
3.5.1 The interactive dimension
3.5.2 The interactional dimension
3.6 Expressive classification
3.6.1 Entity
3.6.2 Attribute
3.6.3 Relation
3.7 Summary
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Methodology
4.1 Data information
4.1.1 Corpus construction
4.1.2 Corpus tagging
4.2 Data analysis
4.2.1 Data search
4.2.2 Analytical procedure
4.3 Summary
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Overall results: Frequency, distribution and wordlist
5.1 Overall frequency
5.1.1 The five lexico-grammatical patterns
5.1.2 The rhetorical features
5.2 Overall distribution
5.2.1 The lexico-grammatical patterns across disciplines
5.2.2 The rhetorical features across disciplines
5.2.3 The lexico-grammatical patterns across divisions of research articles
5.2.4 The rhetorical features across divisions of research articles
5.3 Wordlist of the ten most frequent metadiscursive nouns
5.3.1 Frequent words by lexico-grammatical pattern
5.3.2 Frequent words in each discipline
5.3.3 Frequent words in each division of research articles
5.4 Summary
References
Chapter 6: Interactive function: Anaphoric and cataphoric cohesion
6.1 The determiner + N pattern
6.1.1 Cohesive functions
6.1.1.1 Disciplinary variation
6.1.1.2 Difference across rhetorical divisions
6.1.2 Attended this vs. unattended this
6.1.2.1 Verb forms
6.2 The N + post-nominal clause pattern
6.2.1 Disciplinary variation
6.2.2 Difference across research article sections
6.3 Summary
References
Chapter 7: Interactional function: Stance and engagement
7.1 The determiner + N pattern
7.1.1 Engagement feature
7.1.2 Stance expression
7.1.2.1 Difference across research article divisions
7.1.2.2 Disciplinary variation
7.2 The N + post-nominal clause pattern
7.2.1 Difference across research article divisions
7.2.2 Disciplinary variation
7.3 Summary
References
Chapter 8: Conclusion
8.1 Summary of the study
8.2 Limitations of the study
8.3 Theoretical and pedagogical implications
8.3.1 Theoretical understanding
8.3.2 Pedagogical implications
8.4 Final remarks
References
Appendix 1: Journal list
Appendix 2: TreeTagger tagset
Appendix 3: An illustration of the typical nouns in each category in the corpus
Index