Students’ argumentative writing is substandard in the sense that the necessary relations, amongst other things, are not indicated in their texts. These texts also often lack an author’s voice. In a module such as academic literacy, it is important to pay attention to the means in which these particular problems can be solved. Part of the aims of a course in academic literacy is to equip students with the necessary academic literacy abilities (which include reading and writing ability) and in doing so, teach them to function properly in a tertiary discourse community. In this study, only the written component of academic literacy will be considered. Following the above mentioned problems, the focus will be specifically on items of metadiscourse, which may form part of a possible solution to improve students’ writing. Hyland (2004) distinguishes between two main categories of metadiscourse, namely the interactive and the interactional categories (which each consists of five subcategories). The aim of these categories is to guide the reader through the text in a specific way, and also to actively involve the reader with the textual content and the reading process. If these aspects of metadiscourse are applied effectively, the text may be more cohesive and coherent and a stronger reader-writer-relationship may be established. A corpus-linguistic approach has been followed in the investigation of the frequency of the occurrence of the subcategories of metadiscourse, as well as the functional suitability thereof. The data analysis is based on Hyland’s (2004) analytical framework of metadiscourse categories, which has been adapted according to the data that has been processed with WordSmith Tools (version 6.0). In this study, the focus group is Afrikaans L1 first-year students at the North-West University’s Vaal Triangle Campus in the year 2010. All 109 participants in the study were registered for AGLA111 (Introduction to Academic Literacy) and AGLA121 (Academic Literacy). The texts that were gathered from AGLA111 are represented in corpus 1 whereas the texts gathered from AGLA121 are represented in corpus 2. The data that was provided by these two corpora was measured against an honours corpus (consisting of 39 texts), which served as the norm for this study. The data interpretation can be divided into four categories, namely phenomena that show a statistically significant change in the correct direction, phenomena that were correct from the start and did not show any change between corpus 1 and corpus 2, phenomena that did not show any change between corpus 1 and corpus 2 but that differed from the honours corpus, as well as phenomena that show incorrect development. Recommendations, which have been based on the literature review and text analysis, are made with regard to specific aspects relating to metadiscourse and the teaching of academic literacy modules (on which this study is founded). These recommendations primarily focus on how students’ attention can be focused on the requirements proposed for writing an argumentative text. / MA (Afrikaans en Nederlands), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

This thesis examines the way in which purpose and identity are realised in the written case reports of radiography students in comparison with those of professional writers. Students entering a new discourse community have to take on a new social identity and this identity is expressed by means of familiarity with the appropriate discourse conventions, including genre as the most overt expression of rhetorical purpose. Also important are the pragmatic choices used by writers to guide readers’ understanding of text and to construct interaction between them, i.e. metadiscourse, which here provides an additional and complementary way of viewing purpose and identity. The study aims, at a more theoretical level, to make a contribution to writing research by integrating genre analysis and metadiscourse analysis within a single framework to provide new insight into the resources available to writers to construe identity in text. At a descriptive level, it provides analyses of a hitherto neglected genre of medical writing. Because the study compares the writing of novices and professionals, the description of this genre makes findings available for pedagogical application. Radiographers and radiologists work as members of the same professional teams and both publish case reports, often in the same journals. Data for the study is provided by two corpora of reports, one produced by radiography students and the other published in national journals by professionals. The genre analysis establishes the move structure of the radiological case study for both corpora and a cross-corpus analysis of metadiscourse demonstrates how identity is realised in the text as the moves unfold. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted with regard to the data. The student reports appear to be examples of a sub-genre of case reports with the move structure and metadiscoursal strategies differing in several significant ways, reflecting the different purposes and identities of the writers. Student writers are found not to be concerned with the more persuasive rhetorical functions of the genre and tend to align themselves with the viewpoint of the patient rather than the medical profession, drawing on school essay discourse and making use of metadiscoursal strategies associated with textbooks. / Linguistics / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

This MA thesis explores the means of expressing interpersonal function in Czech and English academic texts. These expressions are found at various levels (e.g. lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical) and our classification takes into account both formal and functional point of view. From the various approaches to meadiscourse we have chosen the integrative approach subsuming both interpersonal and textual features of metadiscouse. However, this thesis focuses mainly on the interpersonal features. In the first part of the thesis, a detailed analysis of four academic texts was performed in order to get a range of expressions for the controlling search. The aim of the controlling search was to verify the findings from the detailed analysis and to find out to what extent the selected expressions were represented in a larger set of data. For this search we gathered twenty academic articles dealing with linguistics, ten per each language. Despite the different language types, Czech and English use similar means to express interpersonal features of metadiscourse. The greatest difference was found in the category of relational markers and self-mentions, other categories displayed relatively similar frequencies. Key words: metadiscourse, interpersonal function, Czech, English, academic register,...

Research conducted in the readability of texts shows that there is an extensive problem with learners' of all phases academic skills in terms of reading comprehension and insight into writing texts in accordance with generally accepted academic standards. It is important that sufficient attention and research are devoted to possible solutions to this problem, since various theorists have found that effective reading and writing skills are of great importance for learners' academic progress and achievement. A reason for this is that most academic material that is made available to learners appear in written format, and that learners have to report on their knowledge in the same format. Although educational institutions formulate academic texts (of which study guides form part) with a high readability level, the current study investigates some problems and shortcomings that appear in study guides. If the readability of the mentioned study material is increased in light of text linguistic insights, learners should have greater accessibility to the textual content, which could impact positively on academic achievement. With the above mentioned in mind, this study focuses on a text linguistic approach to investigating the readability of study guides which are written for first-year learners at a tertiary institution. The main problem addresses how lexical cohesive devices and conjunction markers can be included as part of a text linguistic approach to writing study guides, and how this can be used by authors of study guides in practice as a tool to increase the efficiency of the writing process. The research is conducted on the basis of various theories, which include Systemic Functional Linguistics, Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion theory and Stotsky's adaptation thereof for written academic texts, as well as Hyland's theory about academic metadiscourse. Applicable insights regarding text linguistic criteria for writing academic texts, which are identified through this literature study, are converted into a framework for text analysis and then implemented to investigate the effective use of specific textual markers in the obtained study guides. This will be done in a descriptive and primarily qualitative manner. Ten Afrikaans study guides, pertaining to diverse subject groups, and which were recently used at a tertiary institution as introductory study guides for first-year learners, form the data of this study. In order to conduct a reliable investigation, the data is analised procedurally (with reference to the mentioned text analytical model) by hand and also using WordSmith Tools. Based on both the literature study and the text analysis, guidelines that can be used when writing Afrikaans study guides are formulated from a text linguistic point of view. These guidelines may be used to supplement the existing guide used by writers of study guides at the particular institution. The possibility also exists that these guidelines can be used to improve and standardise the quality and readability of the mentioned learning material. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

Research conducted in the readability of texts shows that there is an extensive problem with learners' of all phases academic skills in terms of reading comprehension and insight into writing texts in accordance with generally accepted academic standards. It is important that sufficient attention and research are devoted to possible solutions to this problem, since various theorists have found that effective reading and writing skills are of great importance for learners' academic progress and achievement. A reason for this is that most academic material that is made available to learners appear in written format, and that learners have to report on their knowledge in the same format. Although educational institutions formulate academic texts (of which study guides form part) with a high readability level, the current study investigates some problems and shortcomings that appear in study guides. If the readability of the mentioned study material is increased in light of text linguistic insights, learners should have greater accessibility to the textual content, which could impact positively on academic achievement. With the above mentioned in mind, this study focuses on a text linguistic approach to investigating the readability of study guides which are written for first-year learners at a tertiary institution. The main problem addresses how lexical cohesive devices and conjunction markers can be included as part of a text linguistic approach to writing study guides, and how this can be used by authors of study guides in practice as a tool to increase the efficiency of the writing process. The research is conducted on the basis of various theories, which include Systemic Functional Linguistics, Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion theory and Stotsky's adaptation thereof for written academic texts, as well as Hyland's theory about academic metadiscourse. Applicable insights regarding text linguistic criteria for writing academic texts, which are identified through this literature study, are converted into a framework for text analysis and then implemented to investigate the effective use of specific textual markers in the obtained study guides. This will be done in a descriptive and primarily qualitative manner. Ten Afrikaans study guides, pertaining to diverse subject groups, and which were recently used at a tertiary institution as introductory study guides for first-year learners, form the data of this study. In order to conduct a reliable investigation, the data is analised procedurally (with reference to the mentioned text analytical model) by hand and also using WordSmith Tools. Based on both the literature study and the text analysis, guidelines that can be used when writing Afrikaans study guides are formulated from a text linguistic point of view. These guidelines may be used to supplement the existing guide used by writers of study guides at the particular institution. The possibility also exists that these guidelines can be used to improve and standardise the quality and readability of the mentioned learning material. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

This thesis examines the way in which purpose and identity are realised in the written case reports of radiography students in comparison with those of professional writers. Students entering a new discourse community have to take on a new social identity and this identity is expressed by means of familiarity with the appropriate discourse conventions, including genre as the most overt expression of rhetorical purpose. Also important are the pragmatic choices used by writers to guide readers’ understanding of text and to construct interaction between them, i.e. metadiscourse, which here provides an additional and complementary way of viewing purpose and identity. The study aims, at a more theoretical level, to make a contribution to writing research by integrating genre analysis and metadiscourse analysis within a single framework to provide new insight into the resources available to writers to construe identity in text. At a descriptive level, it provides analyses of a hitherto neglected genre of medical writing. Because the study compares the writing of novices and professionals, the description of this genre makes findings available for pedagogical application. Radiographers and radiologists work as members of the same professional teams and both publish case reports, often in the same journals. Data for the study is provided by two corpora of reports, one produced by radiography students and the other published in national journals by professionals. The genre analysis establishes the move structure of the radiological case study for both corpora and a cross-corpus analysis of metadiscourse demonstrates how identity is realised in the text as the moves unfold. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted with regard to the data. The student reports appear to be examples of a sub-genre of case reports with the move structure and metadiscoursal strategies differing in several significant ways, reflecting the different purposes and identities of the writers. Student writers are found not to be concerned with the more persuasive rhetorical functions of the genre and tend to align themselves with the viewpoint of the patient rather than the medical profession, drawing on school essay discourse and making use of metadiscoursal strategies associated with textbooks. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

E-commerce has exploded and with that also advertisements online. To get customers to stay as customers with your company, advertisements become more and more persuasive. To measure this persuasion metadiscourse has been used as a method for this investigation. The aim of this paper is to find out the ways companies use language and discourse to entice customers and keep them buying products. The material chosen for this investigation was advertisements extracted from web pages of make-up brands. Hyland´s categories of metadiscourse were used to extract the relevant features from the advertisements. The results were that all advertisements that had metalinguistic features were also persuasive. Persuasive language occurs as boosters, engagement markers and self-mentions. Also, the metalinguistic features that occur in this investigation are the three categories mentioned above. Further investigation into this topic would be to only view editorial parts of advertisements which most likely will broaden the results within all categories from Hyland´s view of metadiscourse.

nÃo hà / CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Nesta dissertaÃÃo, propomos uma articulaÃÃo entre os marcadores metadiscursivos na perspectiva elaborada por Hyland (2005), na sequÃncia argumentativa de Bronckart, (2007) e de alguns processos referenciais, como as anÃforas e os dÃiticos sob a Ãtica de Cavalcante (2003) em redaÃÃes de vestibulandos da Universidade Federal do MaranhÃo (UFMA). A proposta deste trabalho à identificar e descrever as funÃÃes metadiscursivas nessas dissertaÃÃes, no intuito de observar o emprego dos operadores metadiscursivos na construÃÃo argumentativa e da possibilidade do uso desses operadores como processos de referenciaÃÃo. Destacando assim a visÃo interativa caracterÃstica de um texto argumentativo que pressupÃe as dimensÃes de posicionamento do autor frente aos seus argumentos e a busca do engajamento do leitor. Partindo do pressuposto de que a presenÃa ou ausÃncia de indicadores metadiscursivos no texto pode revelar a escolha de estratÃgias prÃprias da lÃngua para aumentar o nÃvel de persuasÃo dos seus argumentos. / In this dissertation, we propose an articulation between the metadiscoursive markers in the perspective devised by Hyland (2005), in Bronckartâs (2007) argumentative â.sequence, and some referential processes, such as anaphors and deictics under Cavalcanteâs (2003) scope, found in the Federal University of Maranhao (UFMA) vestibular candidatesâ essays. The purpose of this work is to identify and describe the metadiscoursive functions in those essays, in order to observe the use of metadiscoursive operators in the argumentative construction and the possibility of the usage of such operators as referential processes. Thus, highlighting the interactive vision inherent to an argumentative text that assumes the authorâs position dimensions in regards to his/her arguments and the pursuit to engage the reader. Starting from the assumption that the presence, or absence, of metadiscoursive markers in the text can reveal the strategy choices innate to the language in order to increase the persuasion in his/her arguments

La grande variété et l’hybridité de l’œuvre durassienne ne sont plus à prouver. Dès lors, la question de l’art poétique de Marguerite Duras se pose de manière particulièrement probante ; elle est l’occasion de réenvisager différemment cette pratique artistique hétérogène, de dépasser les clivages traditionnels pour découvrir une conception intérieure et injonctive de l’écriture. Cette thèse propose d’analyser l’art poétique de Marguerite Duras à travers tous les modes d’expression utilisés par l’écrivain : écrits, films, mais aussi entretiens de toutes natures. L’objectif est de montrer que cet art poétique se construit dans la pratique et donc au fil de l’œuvre. L’écriture y devient métadiscours, elle est pensée comme processus incessant de dénaturation et de réécriture et ainsi confrontée à la métamorphose perpétuelle de sa forme. Ce travail aura pour fondement le phénomène de l’ombre interne, métaphore récurrente du métadiscours durassien, processus originel de l’écriture, déterminé par le mouvement, le commencement et la fin sans fin. Dans un premier temps, nous verrons que le paratexte durassien commente le phénomène de l’écriture mais se livre aussi à un véritable travail de création. Nous montrerons ensuite que les œuvres de nature générique indécidable et les pratiques extralittéraires de Marguerite Duras contribuent à faire du lieu de l’écriture un lieu en mouvement permanent, recourant à une altérité poétique fondamentale. Enfin, les textes fictionnels seront étudiés au regard de cette notion de fiction qui s’insinue dans le discours et dans le narratif et place l’écriture dans une zone particulièrement instable, requérant une absence indispensable. / One does not need to prove anymore that Marguerite Duras’ work is of great variety and hybridity. Therefore, questioning Marguerite Duras’ ars poetica is especially relevant : it offers the opportunity to rethink differently this artistic and heterogenic method, and to cross the traditional borders to discover an internal and injunctive conception of writing. This thesis proposes to analyse Marguerite Duras’ ars poetica through every medium of expression used by the writer: texts, films but also all kinds of interviews. The aim is to show that this ars poetica constructs itself in the writing process. There, the writing becomes metadiscourse, it is thought of as never-ending process of denaturation and rewriting and thus, it is confronted with the perpetual metamorphose of its form. This work will be based on the phenomena of the internal shade, the recurrent metamorphose of the metadiscourse and the original process of writing determined by the movement, the beginning of the end without ending. First, we will see that the paratext comments on the phenomena of writing but also allows a real work of creation. Then, we will show that her works whose generic nature is undecided and Marguerite Duras’ extraliterary practices contribute to transformthe place of writing into one of permanent movement, using a fundamental poetic alterity. Finally, the fictional texts will be studied through the notion of fiction that insinuates in the discourse and in the narrative and places the writing on a particularly instable zone, needing a necessary absence.

Cette thèse s’intéresse aux énoncés catégorisés métadiscursivement comme ironiques par le dramaturge dans les didascalies et par l’instance journalistique dans la presse écrite. Par la sélection du corpus sur la base des métadiscours, nous tentons de nous départir d’une démarche fondée sur des critères subjectifs et, partant, d’une définition pré-construite de l’ironie. Il s’agit de déterminer les sens que les locuteurs-scripteurs attachent à ces termes afin de dresser un portrait prototypique voire plusieurs portraits récurrents de l’ironie, et d’envisager, dans un second temps, une comparaison entre les deux genres étudiés. On analyse ainsi le processus de production de sens en recherchant les éléments qui ont conduit, dans tel ou tel contexte, le locuteur à caractériser l’énoncé comme ironique. Nous entendons démontrer que l’ironie est une, malgré sa complexité apparente : elle consiste en une forme de moquerie qui passe par une attaque indirecte. Nous analysons ainsi les différents éléments mis en avant par les diverses conceptions de l’ironie existantes (écho, feintise, antiphrase, implicite…) comme des procédés par lesquels s’exerce la moquerie, qui peuvent selon les cas se combiner ou se réaliser isolément. / This thesis is concerned with utterances metadiscursively categorized as ironic by playwright in the stage directions, and by the journalistic authority in the press, in order to be part of a approach untied to subjective criteria and, consequently, liberated from a predefined conception of irony. This is to determine meaning that speakers-writers attach to these terms in order to develop a prototypical portrait or several portraits recurring of irony by comparative study of two above textual genres. Thus, we study the process of meaning production by searching for information that led, in a particular context, speaker to characterize his statement as ironic. We intend to demonstrate that irony is one, despite its apparent complexity: it is a form of mockery that goes through an indirect attack. We analyze different elements, highlighted by various existing conceptions of irony (echo, pretense, antiphrasis, implicit …), as processes by which mockery is exerted, which can be combined with each other or achieve alone.