Abstract
The present study investigated the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in short stories as a kind of literary genre and how these markers are used by short story writers to produce persuasive texts. It is a pioneering study, since very few studies in the literature tackled literary genre and no study involved analyzing short stories. The corpus of 88,940 words consisted of 18 short story texts written by the three famous American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Raymond Carver. To analyze this corpus, Hyland’s (2005) comprehensive model of metadiscourse was used. Results of the study indicated that metadiscourse markers are employed by short story writers to produce coherent texts and to make their stories persuasive. These results agreed with those of previous studies that involved literary texts indicating that metadiscourse markers are used frequently in such texts. The study findings proved that short stories are considered as persuasive texts not only due to non-linguistic factors, such as transportation, but also due to a linguistic one, namely, the use of metadiscourse markers. This finding is the most significant one, since it refutes the opinion that short stories are persuasive texts solely due to transportation and other similar factors.
Highlights
Metadiscourse is a cover term for words that writers or speakers use for the purpose of indicating the direction and purpose of a text
The present study investigated the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in short stories as a kind of literary genre and how these markers are used by short story writers to produce persuasive texts
The analysis revealed that the total number of metadiscourse markers in the corpus is 6,749 as shown in Table 5 below: The above Table provides the answers to questions No 1 and No 2 of the research concerning the types of metadiscourse markers used in the corpus and their frequency
Summary
Metadiscourse is a cover term for words that writers or speakers use for the purpose of indicating the direction and purpose of a text. The term was first used by Harris in 1959 to refer to a way of understanding language in use In this sense, metadiscourse represents the attempts of the writer or speaker to guide the perception of the text receiver (Hyland, 2005: 3). Metadiscourse enables the writer to “guide, direct and inform” the reader in the way he (the writer or speaker) wants the reader or hearer to respond to the text content. It is an important category for creating a text, and for reading it (Crismore, 1989: 64). It is a term that covers “self- reflective expressions”, as he calls them, whose function is to “negotiate interactional meaning in a text” in order to help the writer (or speaker) to convey a point of view, and “engage with readers as members of a particular community (Hyland, 2005: 37)
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