Metadiscourse in Academic Speech: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

Description

Even though metadiscourse has recently received considerable attention, most research revolves around written, not spoken, metadiscourse. This book studies spoken metadiscourse in two academic genres in the engineering field, the lecture and the peer seminar. It examines what motivates metadiscourse and how engineering academics resort to different types of metadiscourse when they address different audiences. Based on relevance theory (RT), this study provides a socio-cognitive framework within which metadiscourse is analysed. The author draws on RT’s generic concept of cognitive environment and uses it to describe the academic context in particular. This theoretical perspective provides novel insights into motivations, abilities and preferences of engineering academics when using metadiscourse in the two genres under study. Table of Contents List of Tables 11 List of Figures 12 Transcription Conventions 13 Acknowledgements 15 Introduction 17 Chapter One - Exploring Discourse 19 1. Discourse Analysis 19 1.1 Interdisciplinarity 20 1.2 General Issues in Discourse Analysis 20 1.3 Core Properties of Language and Discourse 25 2. Meaning, Context and Communication in Pragmatics 31 3. Relevance Theory: a Cognitive Theory 33 3.1 The First Principle of Relevance 35 3.2 The Second Principle of Relevance 40 3.3 Explicature and Implicature 46 3.4 Connectives 49 3.5 Final Remark 51 Chapter Two - Exploring Metadiscourse 57 1. Metadiscourse: an Appraisal 58 1.1 Early Approaches to Metadiscourse 61 1.2 Later Studies 73 1.3 Integrative and Separative Approaches to Metadiscourse 81 1.4 Relevance-theoretic Interpretations of Metadiscourse 89 2. A Picture of Metadiscourse 92 2.1 Effects 92 2.2 Effort 105 3. Discourse and Metadiscourse Integrated 107 Chapter Three - The Scientific Community: Situating Cognition 115 1. The Scientific Community 118 1.1 The Scientific Discourse Community 118 2. Communication in Science 126 2.1 The Social Context of Scientific Writing 126 2.2 Rhetorical Studies: Persuasion in Scientific Communication and the Scientific Community as Audience 129 2.3 Genre Studies 136 3. Goal and Hypothesis 144 Chapter Four - Two Forms of Communication in the Academia 149 1. Method 149 2. Analysis of Lectures and Seminars from a Socio-Cognitive Approach 152 2.1 Defining Lectures and Peer Seminars 153 2.2 Mapping the Shared Arena of Lectures and Seminars 161 2.3 The Singularities of the Lecture Arena and the Seminar Arena 183 3. A Relevance-theoretic Interpretation of Metadiscourse 205 3.1 Four Assumptions Derived from an RT interpretation of Metadiscourse 205 3.2 A Definition of Metadiscourse 217 3.3 A Classification of Metadiscourse 220 3.4 Metadiscourse, Relevance Theory and Situated Cognition 237 4. Quantitative Analysis of Metadiscourse in Lectures and Seminars 241 Conclusions 257 References 265