Metadiscursive nouns in disciplinary writing

Abstract

When writing up research, academic authors step into texts to organise discourse flow, offer readers textual support and interpretations of their data, while persuading readers of their claims. Analysts of academic discourse have come to regard hedges, reporting verbs, directives and so on as among a wide repertoire of interactive features available to authors, using 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 study 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 neighborhoods are less disadvantaged’). I choose the term “metadiscursive nouns” to emphasise the metadiscursive function nouns play, the fact that they work in a similar way to metadiscourse, to connect stretches of discourse, express authorial perspective and interact with readers as members of a particular community. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, I see metadiscursive nouns functioning in both interactive and interactional dimensions. In the interactive dimension, metadiscursive nouns build anaphoric and cataphoric linking of texts and thus organise cohesive discourse; in the interactional dimension, they project authorial stance on propositions and engage readers in the joint construction of academic discourse. Based on a 1.7 million word corpus of 160 research articles from both soft and hard knowledge fields, the study sets out to explore how metadiscursive nouns are rhetorically used to mediate writer-reader interaction in disciplinary writing. The results show that determiner + N and N + post-nominal clause are the most frequent structures where metadiscursive nouns are used, setting up anaphoric and cataphoric reference respectively. In addition, soft disciplines use metadiscursive nouns far more frequently than hard domains, which manifests the discursive nature of academic arguments and possibly the greater need of the diverse audience for textual support in the soft knowledge fields. The choice of metadiscursive nouns does not only structure discourse or specify the content they cover, but socially reflects the knowledge-making practices and discursive norms in the disciplines. Furthermore, writers also vary in their use of metadiscursive nouns when developing arguments across different divisions of research articles, making the most of metadiscursive nouns in the Literature Review and Result sections. Thus metadiscursive nouns are one instrument for achieving social interaction in academic writing. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are also raised in terms of our knowledge of academic writing and nouns and how they can be applied in the teaching of academic writing.