Metadiscourse: the evolution of an approach to texts
-
Ken Hyland
Ken Hyland is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. He has published over 270 articles and 29 books on academic discourse with 73,000 citations on Google Scholar. He was co-editor of
Applied Linguistics andJournal of English for Academic Purposes . A collection of his work was published asthe Essential Hyland (Bloomsbury, 2018) and a 4th edition of his Teaching and Researching Writing was recently published in 2022 with Routledge.
and
Feng (Kevin) Jiang
Feng Kevin Jiang is Kuang Yaming Distinguished Professor in applied linguistics in the School of Foreign Language Education at Jilin University, China. He gained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Ken Hyland at the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His publications have appeared in most major applied linguistics journals. He is co-author (with Ken Hyland) of
Academic Discourse and Global Publishing: Disciplinary Persuasion in Changing Times (2019, Routledge).
Abstract
Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing, revealing something of how communication involves the personalities, attitudes and assumptions of those who are communicating. It offers a framework for understanding communication as social engagement and helps reveal how writers and speakers consider their audience in creating texts. This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to trace the growing interest in metadiscourse since its early incarnations in the 1980s. To do so we analysed all 431 papers relating to metadiscourse in the core collection of the Web of Science between 1983 and 2020, dividing the corpus into two periods following the massive increase in interest after 2006. We identify which topics have been most prevalent, which authors and publications most influential and which disciplines and journals most active in citing the metadiscourse literature. The findings show the importance of academic and business writing, cross-disciplinary, language and genre studies, and the increasing predominance of an interpersonal model. These findings may be of interest to those working in discourse analysis and the study of social interaction.
About the authors
Ken Hyland is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. He has published over 270 articles and 29 books on academic discourse with 73,000 citations on Google Scholar. He was co-editor of Applied Linguistics and Journal of English for Academic Purposes. A collection of his work was published as the Essential Hyland (Bloomsbury, 2018) and a 4th edition of his Teaching and Researching Writing was recently published in 2022 with Routledge.
Feng Kevin Jiang is Kuang Yaming Distinguished Professor in applied linguistics in the School of Foreign Language Education at Jilin University, China. He gained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Ken Hyland at the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His publications have appeared in most major applied linguistics journals. He is co-author (with Ken Hyland) of Academic Discourse and Global Publishing: Disciplinary Persuasion in Changing Times (2019, Routledge).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Typography and meaning-making in Arabic children’s literature: the covert communication!
- Car bumper stickers in Jordan as a site of carnivalesque transgression and degradation
- The problem of translating Chinese policy-related expressions: a case study of wenming (‘civilised’)
- Metaphor(s) of the platform economy in the trade union discourse
- Stance construction via that-clauses in telecommunications research articles: a comparison of L1 and L2 expert writers
- Review Article
- Metadiscourse: the evolution of an approach to texts
