Metadiscursive Nouns: Interaction and Persuasion in Disciplinary Writing

Based on a 1.7-million-word corpus of 160 research articles from both soft and hard knowledge fields, this book sets out to explore how a particular type of noun – namely, the metadiscursive noun – is rhetorically used to mediate writer-reader interaction in disciplinary writing.

Analysts of academic discourse have come to regard hedges, reporting verbs, directives and so on as forming part of a wide repertoire of interactive features available to authors, suggesting a variety of terms, incl...