Connecting with the reader: participant-oriented metadiscourse in newspaper texts

Abstract

Metadiscourse, broadly characterized as “discourse about discourse,” manifests itself in many written, spoken, and electronic genres. In line with the reflexive model of metadiscourse, the present article aims at a rich description of metadiscourse in its context. The article examines transition sentences (TS), a relevant discourse category in newspaper texts. The empirical analysis focuses on a metadiscursive device discovered in the Finnish data, the so-called dialogical passive (typically translated as Let's, Let me, or Why don't we). It is an instance of participant-oriented metadiscourse. Its discourse functions include topic management, source management, management of narrative time and place, initiating an illustration, and evaluative comments. Furthermore, the article explores constraints for metadiscourse. These constraints relate to the style of writing (e.g., genre), the layout and the discourse patterns of texts, professional issues (such as media profiles and writer profiles), and the narrative patterns and rhetoric.