Interactional metadiscourse: Building rapport and solidarity in informational-persuasive discourse. An English-Spanish case study

Abstract

Metadiscourse has been subject of linguistic inquiry for a few decades. Nevertheless, the role and behaviour of metadiscourse in various non-academic discourses is still on the research agenda. This study contributes to this niche by examining interactional metadiscourse in informational-persuasive discourse, an under-researched promotional sub-genre taking a move analysis approach. Aware of the co(n)textual nature of metadiscourse, we conducted an English-Spanish (EN-ES) contrastive analysis of interactional markers taken from an ad-hoc comparable corpus of online tea descriptions. Benefiting from the rhetorical tagging of the corpus, devices that seemed to build a direct relation between writer-reader were identified manually, per move, and then classified as ‘commentary’ markers (Dafouz-Milne, 2008). Findings reveal variation of interactional metadiscourse within the genre moves and across languages. First, the more overtly persuasive and/or instructional a move is, the higher the occurrence of commentary markers. Likewise, while ‘direct address’ and ‘directives’ stand out both in EN and in ES, EN relies on ‘self-mentions’ to a great extent, while ES does so with ‘inclusive we’. Overall, the study attests to the role of interactional metadiscourse in building rapport to persuade potential customers, be it through ethos, as in EN, or logos, as in ES.