Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background

At the end of the 19th century, the philosophical inquiry experienced alinguistic turn, which deeply impacted on the research of humanities and socialscience. The influence of the linguistic turn is manifested in dual aspects: on the onehand, philosophical study made a turn to focus on language，thus transforming theWestern philosophy in the 20th century into language philosophy in a wide sense; onthe other hand，other humanities and social disciplines beyond philosophy had beencovered by the linguistic turn in philosophical study. Linguistics is one of theresearch territories which is shadowed.The occurrence of the linguistic turn orginated from two thousand years ago.Dating back to those years, Western philosophers had been trying to dig out what theworld was，that is, the logos or being of the world and then they started to explorethe epistemology of world and now it has great influence for philosophersthemselves to inquire into language for the purpose of dissecting the world. Inaddition，German philosopher and linguist，Wilhelm Humboldt (1836) proposed aproposition of ‘language world view，，which is quite similar to 'Sapire-WhorfHypothesis'. Both of the viewpoints show us a direction to depict the being of worldby means of language. For linguistic scholars, the being of language is the first to beworked out before undertaking linguistic research. That is to say，the research oflanguage issues should affiise the spirit of philosophical turn in linguistics, namelytaking the awareness of being or logos of language itself into consideration alongwith research (Pan Wenguo 2008), since philosophy guides the advance of the wholedisciplines and its change of research direction definitely has effect on all the research disciplines or fields. Exploring the language with the spirit of philosophicalturn means to pioneer a new path to know about the world..

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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance

This thesis intends to probe the philosophical essence of metadiscourse markersin English academic discourse and the ways communicative action meaning arerepresented via metadiscourse resources in light of communicative action theoryproposed by Jurgen Habermas. The theory is aimed to explore the action criteria ofintersubjects in life world via language in use. The reciprocal understanding playsthe role in core conception of the theory, that is，the ways communicativeintersubjects attain common ground or consensus, by means of language, to theunderstanding of the world against the backdrop of life world. The interactionalaction meaning of metadiscourse roots in Habermas，s communicative action theory,in which the meaning is achieved through the function of implementingunderstanding to discourse. In addition，Habermas,s universal pragmatics constitutesthe fimdamental framework of communicative action theory. Within the framework,four universal validity claims stipulate the criteria of communicative actionsamongst subjects engaged，and Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourselinguistically correspond to Habermas's universal validity claims，in thatmetadiscoursal resources could be considered as representative resources to fulfilluniversal validity claims. In this thesis, metadiscourse has been delimited in the areaof academic discourse. The community of academic discourse supplies contextualresources to bring about the interactional action meaning of metadiscourse for thepurpose of expounding the similarities of representative characteristics ofmetadiscourse in academic texts across disciplines. Thus it might attempt toconstruct the criterion claims of communicative actions in the academic community.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 The Development of Communicative Action Theory

Jurgen Habermas (1984 translated by Cao Weidong 2004) categorized fourtypes of human actions in the world; purposefiil action in which an actor selects themost desirable means to meet purpose after comparing it with other means; actionfor criteria regulation which strictly regulates value expectations held by a humangroup; dramatic action in which an actor consciously reveals his subjectivity in frontof a spectator or society; communicative action in which the actors utilize verbal ornon-verbal signs as the instruments to understand reciprocal statement and actionplans so as to reach consensus in actions.Habermas (1984 translated by Cao Weidong 2004) believes that the worldaround us consists of objective world，social world, subjective world and life world,which last one exists like bridge connecting other three parts of the world as one.Four types of actions respectively tend to the different aspects of the world:purposeful action mainly concerns the objective aspect of the world; action forcriteria regulation corresponds to the social world in which the actions of humanbeings are regulated by various criteria; dramatic world corresponds to the subjective aspect of the world.

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2.2 Metadiscourse

Metadiscourse was coined and first used by Zellig Harris (1959/1970) to offer away of understanding language in use，representing a writer，s or speaker's attempt toguide a receiver's perception about a text (Yang Xinzhang 2007). The concept hasbeen further developed by scholars such as Williams (1981), Vande Kopple (1985),and Crismore (1989)，and they collect a range of discoursal features such as hedges,connectives and various forms of text commentary to show how writers and speakersintrude into their unfolding text to influence their interlocutor's reception. In theseyears, the research of metadiscourse has attracted a great deal of attention fromlinguistic scholars and it is a widely-used term in current discourse analysis(SchifiBrin 1980; Norrick 2001) and language education (Hu Chunhua 2007; HanMeizhu 2009)，referring to an interesting and relatively new approach toconceptualizing interactions between discourse producers and their discourse andbetween discourse producers and users. The metadiscourse represents the writer'sand speaker's several ways of positioning themselves in a written or spoken discourse (Yang Xinzhang 2007).

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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.........    14

3.1 Communicative Action Theory .........  14

3.1.1 An Overview of Communicative Action Theory......... 14

3.1.2 Universal Validity Claims......... 15

3.2 An Overview about Metadiscourse .........  17

3 Analytical Framework .........21

3.3.1 Metadiscourse and Communicative Action Meaning......... 21

3.3.2 The Representation of Communicative Action Meaning......... 22

Chapter Four Research Methodology .........  24

4.1 Research Questions.........   24

4.2 Data Collection .........  25

4.3 Research Methods......... 27

4.4 Research Procedures......... 

Chapter Five Results and Discussion......... 29

5.1 Metadiscourse Markers in English Academic Discourse......... 29

5.2 The Representation of Communicative Action Meaning......... 35

5.3 Summary .........71

5.4 A Unitary Way or Multiple Way?......... 74

Chapter Five Results and Discussion

5.1 Metadiscourse Markers in English Academic Discourse

This section exhibits the general distribution of metadiscourse markers in 30selected English academic articles (humanities and social sciences and naturalsciences) in accordance with the above-mentioned research procedures. The statisticsof distribution are shown in the following tables . Table 5.1 & Table 5.2 present general distribution about metadiscourse markersin humanities and social sciences (HSS) discourse and natural sciences (NS)discourse. The total number of metadiscourse markers in humanities and socialsciences discourse is 9,899 and the total number of markers in natural sciencesdiscourse is 8，429，indicating more metadiscourse markers occur in the field ofhumanities and social sciences. The total amount of metadiscourse markers is 18,328in 30 selected academic discourse.

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Conclusion

The goal of this sdudy is to tentatively explore philosophical essence ofmetadiscourse markers (which are used by writers in academic commimity) in theacademic discourse from the perspective of communicative action theory. Thecommunicative action itself is a philosophical concept from Jiirgen Habermas whoused the theory from philosophical view to study social issues，and it was alsowidely utilized by other researchers to solve social problems (see literature review).In tiiis study, the communicative action theory was applied to explore the essence ofa language phenomenon (viz.，metadiscourse markers) in the academic communityin order to more clearly scrutinize what on earth the markers are in the academicdiscourse. Thus it implies that this study is right on the track of linguistic turn,occuring during the 20th century in the field of Western philosophical exploration.The philosophers initialized to investigate philosophical issues (e.g.，the being of theworld) from language phenomenon as language could perform the role of mediatorto connect entities in the world and philosophical issues.

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Reference (omitted)