Metadiscourse across languages and genres: An overview

Central to successful communication is the writer/speaker’s ability to make statements about the external, experiential world coherent, intelligible and persuasive to a particular audience. This is the domain of metadiscourse, the language we use to help others interpret, evaluate, and react to propositional information in ways that we intend (Hyland, 2005; Ädel & Mauranen, 2010). Following a relatively slow start in the early 1980s, metadiscourse has become one of the dominant ways of analysing discourse, particularly written texts. A search of Scopus returns 620 papers on the topic and Google Scholar over 25,600. Metadiscourse, therefore, is a concept which has found its time, and in this special issue we explore some recent facets of the concept and why it has established itself so firmly as an analytical tool in applied linguistics.