Academic lectures versus political speeches: Metadiscourse functions affected by the role of the audience

Abstract

This study was an attempt to analyze and compare the use of metadiscourse markers that function as audience orientation in academic and political modes of speech. The analysis was based on a corpus of 40 academic lectures and political speeches (20 transcriptions each) following Ädel's (2010) taxonomy of metadiscourse to see to what extent and how these two spoken modes use metadiscourse functions to engage with audiences and involve them in discourse. The findings showed that lectures by far made more frequent use of metadiscourse functions to orient audiences due to their dialogic nature for which lecturers were more likely to pull students into their argumentations and establish linguistic and pragmatic connections with them while delivering information. Furthermore, some variations were depicted between the two modes in the way that metadiscourse functions were performed with some functions being exclusive to academic lectures. These findings suggest that the presence and role of the audience can impact the language choice of an addresser, reflecting the importance of audience awareness in constructing the discourse of oral language in general and dialogic language in particular. This audience awareness can be done either explicitly through audience engagement metadiscourse functions or implicitly through metatext language use.