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Metadiscourse in Digital
Communication
New Research,
Approaches and
Methodologies
Edited by
Larissa D’Angelo
Anna Mauranen
Stefania Maci
 Metadiscourse in Digital Communication

“This book combines a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to

metadiscourse and offers new conceptual tools and frameworks for analysing writ-
ten, spoken and multimodal discourse. The studies included in the volume draw
on data collected from different contexts of digital communication, offering new
perspectives on the role of metadiscourse in building and maintaining interaction
between individuals and within different communities. Importantly, the studies
included here are not restricted to academic and professional domains, as several
authors explore new research avenues, such as communication on social media
platforms.”
—Maria Kuteeva, Professor of English Linguistics, Stockholm University
 Larissa D’Angelo
Anna Mauranen • Stefania Maci
Editors

Metadiscourse
in Digital
Communication
New Research, Approaches and Methodologies
Editors
Larissa D’Angelo Anna Mauranen
Department of Foreign Languages University of Helsinki
Literature and Cultures Helsinki, Finland
University of Bergamo
Bergamo, Italy

Stefania Maci
Department of Foreign Languages
Literature and Cultures
University of Bergamo
Bergamo, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-85813-1    ISBN 978-3-030-85814-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85814-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been supported by the MIUR-funded research project

(PRIN—Research Project of National Interest) Knowledge Dissemination
Across Media in English: Continuity and Change in Discourse Strategies,
Ideologies, and Epistemology under the COFIN grant agreement no.
2015TJ8ZAS_002. The Knowledge Dissemination Across Media in English
project ran from 2017 to 2020 and included six university partners:
Modena, Bergamo, Pisa, Rome, Milan and Florence. The project, central
to innovation in research and institutional change, focussed on different
aspects of knowledge dissemination (KD): disciplinary KD strategies of
recontextualisation in webgenres (webpages and blogs) (Modena), jour-
nal websites and the impact of digital publishing on generic hybridization
(Bergamo), audiovisual genres of KD in ESP contexts (Pisa), the con-
struction of credibility in specialised KD (Rome-Sapienza), critical dis-
course analysis of a thematic issue (bio-ethics) (Milan) and diachronic
perspectives in news discourse (Florence).

v
 Contents

1 Metadiscourse in Digital Communication: A Short

Introduction  1
Larissa D’Angelo and Stefania Maci

2 “Gonna write about it on my blog too” Metadiscourse in

Research Blog Discussions 11
Anna Mauranen

3 Reflections on Reflexivity in Digital Communication:

Towards a Third Wave of Metadiscourse Studies 37
Annelie Ädel

4 Metadiscourse in Academic Research Articles Versus Blogs:

Paul Krugman as a Case Study 65
Donatella Malavasi

5 This Has Changed: ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Metadiscourse in

Scientific Graphical Abstracts 81
Carmen Sancho-Guinda

vii
viii Contents

6 Lemons and Watermelons: Visual Advertising and

Conceptual Blending115
Nihada Delibegović Džanić and Sanja Berberović

7 Metadiscourse in Social Media: A Reflexive Framework133

Ylva Biri

Index155
 Notes on Contributors

Annelie Ädel’s research interests include discourse analysis, English for

Specific Purposes and corpus linguistics. She is full professor at Dalarna
University, Sweden. She received her PhD in English linguistics from
Gothenburg University, Sweden, and has been affiliated with the University
of Michigan’s English Language Institute as director of their research unit
on Applied Corpus Linguistics and with Stockholm University as a research
fellow. School of Humanities and Media Studies, Dalarna University,
Falun, Sweden
Sanja Berberović holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of
Osijek, Croatia. She is Associate Professor of English Language and
Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at the
University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her main research interests
are the cognitive theory of metaphor and metonymy and conceptual inte-
gration theory. University of Tuzla, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ylva Biri is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Programme in Language
Studies, University of Helsinki. She received a master’s degree in English
philology from the University of Helsinki. Her MA thesis applied corpus
linguistics to study metadiscourse in blogs and online news texts. She con-
tinues her research in a PhD project on writer-­reader interaction in inter-
est-based social media groups. Her research interests include
sociolinguistics, register analysis and computer-mediated communica-
tion. Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Larissa D’Angelo is Associate Professor of English Language and

Translation at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and
Cultures of the University of Bergamo and the Head of the University
Eyetracking Lab. She is an active member of CERLIS (Research Centre
on Specialized Languages), and her main research interests deal with bio-
metric analyses, multimodality, audiovisual translation, corpus linguistics
and metadiscourse. Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and
Cultures, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
Nihada Delibegović Džanić PhD, is Associate Professor of English
Language and Linguistics at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and
Herzegovina. She teaches linguistics courses at undergraduate and post-
graduate levels. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of
Osijek, Croatia. Her main interests are cognitive linguistics and phraseol-
ogy. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tuzla,
Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Stefania Maci (PhD, Lancaster University, UK) is Full Professor of
English Language at the University of Bergamo. She is Director of
CERLIS (Research Centre on Specialized Languages), and member of
CLAVIER (The Corpus and Language Variation in English Research
Group), BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics), AELINCO
(Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics), and ESSE (European Society
for the Study of English). She also serves on the Board of AIA (Associazione
Italiana di Anglistica). Her research is focussed on the study of the English
language in academic and professional contexts, with particular regard to
the analysis of tourism and medical discourses. Department of Foreign
Languages, Literature and Cultures, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
Donatella Malavasi is Associate Professor of English Language and
Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her research
interests lie in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and business commu-
nication. Her current research activity deals with the practices and strate-
gies of knowledge dissemination across genres in business and academic
contexts. Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali, Università degli
Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy
Anna Mauranen is Professor and Research Director at the University of
Helsinki. Her research and publications include ELF, academic discourses,
corpus linguistics, translation studies and theoretical modelling of speech.
She is co-editor of Applied Linguistics and formerly founding co-editor of
 Notes on Contributors  xi

the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca. Recent books: Language

Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca (2020; co-ed with
Vetchinnikova); Linguistic Diversity on the EMI Campus (2019; Co-ed
with Jennifer Jenkins); (forthc.) Reflexively Speaking – Uses of Metadiscourse
in ELF (DeGruyter Mouton). University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Carmen Sancho-Guinda has been teaching Professional and Academic
Communication in the Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and
Technology at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for more than
30 years. Her major research interests comprise the interdisciplinary analysis
of academic, professional and political discourses and genres, the discourse
of science dissemination and outreach, and the teaching/learning of aca-
demic literacies, especially within the area of English-medium instruction in
higher education. She is the editor-in-chief of Ibérica, and editorial board
member of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Dpto. de
Lingüística Aplicada a la Ciencia y la Tecnología, ETSIAE (Escuela Técnica
Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio), Universidad Politécnica
de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The reflexive triangle. (Based on Ädel, 2006) 41

Fig. 3.2 Sketch of a screenshot of the vlogger starting the first game 47
Fig. 3.3 Sketch of a screenshot of the vlogger chatting in the first game 48
Fig. 3.4 Sketch of a screenshot of the vlogger in the second game. The
grey shape in the centre is meant to depict the hand of the
drowning character emerging from the water. English subtitles
are visible below 48
Fig. 3.5 Sketch of a screenshot of the vlogger starting the third game 49
Fig. 3.6 Illustration of the metadiscourse that occurs in the vlog, where
the vertical red line represents the main vlog frame and the
horizontal grey lines represent the three gaming sequences 50
Fig. 3.7 Sketch of a screenshot showing written text summing up the
metalinguistic sequence 53
Fig. 5.1 Genre constellation of visual abstracts 90
Fig. 5.2 Different variants of the visual narrative/evolution pattern.
(Accessible in Windows Office’s toolbar) 92
Fig. 5.3 Different variants of classificatory representations. (Accessible in
Windows Office’s toolbar) 93
Fig. 5.4 A proposal for a taxonomy of stylisation 106
Fig. 5.5 Visual summary of the metadiscursive changes brought about
by digital transduction 108
Fig. 6.1 The basic diagram representing a conceptual integration
network (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002: 46) 122
Fig. 6.2 Conceptual integration network for the advertisement If life
gives you lemons, a simple surgery can give you melons125
Fig. 6.3 Conceptual integration network for Know your lemons campaign 128

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Orienting and retrieving discourse reflexivity in spoken

dialogues and monologues 23
Table 2.2 Egocentric and altercentric discourse reflexivity in spoken
dialogues and monologues 24
Table 2.3 Orienting and retrieving discourse reflexivity in dialogues:
digital and spoken 25
Table 2.4 Egocentric and altercentric discourse reflexivity in dialogue:
digital and spoken 25
Table 2.5 Altercentric metadiscourse in dialogues: addressee versus third
party26
Table 2.6 Third-party references in blog threads 27
Table 3.1 A taxonomy of text response building on Rose (2008) 57
Table 4.1 Research articles: metadiscursive units with related raw
frequency and the number of texts in which they occur 69
Table 4.2 Blog posts: metadiscursive units with related raw frequency
and the number of texts in which they occur 73
Table 5.1 GA typology of exemplars in Elsevier’s website 99
Table 5.2 Taxonomy of visual interactive metadiscourse items
(signposters) in Elsevier’s GA exemplars 100
Table 5.3 Taxonomy of visual interactive metadiscourse (signposting)
based on compositional strategies in Elsevier’s GA exemplars 101
Table 5.4 Taxonomy of visual interactional metadiscourse (stance and
engagement) based on compositional strategies in Elsevier’s
GA exemplars 102

xv
xvi List of Tables

Table 7.1 Data sample used 140

Table 7.2 Personal metadiscourse categories 141
Table 7.3 Impersonal metadiscourse categories 144
Table 7.4 Frequencies of metadiscourse categories, per 100 words 149
 CHAPTER 1

Metadiscourse in Digital Communication:

A Short Introduction

Larissa D’Angelo and Stefania Maci

Abstract This introduction provides an overview of past and current

research on metadiscourse and highlights new research discourses emerg-
ing from the field. It starts by explaining how metadiscourse has evolved
in the past 20 years and the reasons why it continues to fascinate research-
ers in professional and academic fields in a variety of disciplines and
domains. It then focuses on the fact that as communication moves online
and a variety of genres become digitalised, researchers active in metadis-
course are increasingly concerned with digital communication and are
questioning or adapting well-established methodologies but also propos-
ing new and much-needed perspectives on reflexivity. The field is undoubt-
edly in a flux, and new and interesting approaches and eclectic frameworks
are emerging, some of which are contained in this very volume. The intro-
duction ends with a brief presentation of the chapters that follow.

Keywords Metadiscourse • Digital communication • Reflexivity •

Genre analysis • Discourse analysis • Corpus linguistics

L. D’Angelo (*) • S. Maci

Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Cultures, University of
Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
e-mail: larissa.dangelo@unibg.it; stefania.maci@unibg.it
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
L. D’Angelo et al. (eds.), Metadiscourse in Digital Communication,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85814-8_1
2 L. D’ANGELO AND S. MACI

Metadiscourse is amply used in discourse analysis to refer to an approach

conceptualising interactions “between text producers and their texts and
between texts producers and their users” (Hyland, 2005: 1). It embodies
the idea of language in use and as such is highly dialogic and interpersonal
(Ädel, 2006; Hyland, 2005). Although the term was coined at the end of
the 1950s (Hyland, 2005), the research field was established in the 1980s
and the 1990s, when most of the research work has revolved around writ-
ten, monologic academic genres and where the interactive and interper-
sonal aspects characterising metadiscourse have been seen from a univocal
academic perspective—that of the text producers. Indeed, as claimed by
several scholars (cf, for instance, Garzone et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2015;
Pérez-Llantada, 2016), the interest in oral and written forms offering aca-
demic and non-academic writers extensive space for self-expression and
engagement with readers was long due, leaving behind those modes where
synchronous/asynchronous communication with one’s readers and listen-
ers is central.
The New Millennium saw the upsurge of new, thought-provoking
studies in the field of metadiscourse: innovative trends began to emerge,
developing new research methodologies, including visual research meth-
ods with a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, empha-
sising on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and genre analysis. Amongst
them, a relevant role acquired the analysis of metadiscoursive texts elabo-
rated in digital environments. Pioneers in this sector have been Miller and
Dawn (2004), Davies and Merchant (2007), Mortensen and Walker
(2002), and, notably, Luzón (2006, 2010), who concentrated their inves-
tigation on digital genres and in particular on the academic blog ever since
its appearance. Although scientific interest was still centred on the aca-
demic world and how scholars engage with readers, how they disseminate
results, express opinions and build an academic persona, from this moment,
attention has also been paid to the role of digital technologies as the driv-
ing forces in disseminating scientific knowledge and how information trav-
els through the Web (Buehl, 2015). Studies have been then carried out,
for example, about metadiscursive aspects on websites (González, 2005),
open-source materials, podcasts (Pérez-Llantada, 2016), wikis (Kuteeva,
2011, 2016) and Tweets (Aitamurto & Varma, 2018; Sclafani, 2017;
Zappavigna, 2018), as well as microblogs and blogs (Bondi, 2018; Kuteeva
& Mauranen, 2018; Zou & Hyland, 2019).
Studies on academic blogs (cf., for instance, Luzón, 2006, 2010, 2012,
2013a, b, 2018; Walker, 2006; Trench, 2008; Mauranen, 2013; Kuteeva,
 1 METADISCOURSE IN DIGITAL COMMUNICATION: A SHORT… 3

2016; and Bondi, 2018) reveal the highly interactive quality of these digi-
tal genres, in which scientific discourse is both popularised and democra-
tised, and where, differently from any other academic genre, the author of
the text is openly recognised as responsible for what has been written in
the blog. As claimed by Zou and Hyland (2019), blogs allow to immedi-
ately enhance one’s visibility, construct one’s persona and disseminate
one’s research work to a wider audience going beyond one’s disciplinary
field. Nevertheless, because of the immediacy of response and the uncer-
tainty in the types of audience reached through these digital genres, blog
authors rhetorically and linguistically repackage scientific texts, adopting
and implementing strategies of recontextualisation (Bondi, 2018;
Puschmann, 2013; Yus, 2015), so that non-expert audiences can under-
stand too (Campagna et al., 2012; Myers, 2010). In this recontextualisa-
tion process, authors carefully consider how to present material and what
interactional strategies to use within the digital environment (Puschmann,
2013; Zou & Hyland, 2019). This specific pragmatic goal is achieved with
a type of ‘language in use’ that may confirm the ‘creative’ affordances of
metadiscourse, as discussed above, in a digital environment that is widen-
ing the whole domain of academic and scientific communication in ways
that 20 years ago were unimaginable.
So far, only a few metadiscourse investigations have focused on the
interpersonal dimension of academic discourses and how these are increas-
ingly visible the more they become digitalised. Yus (2015), for example,
underlines the difficulties academic digital writers face when trying to pre-
dict the audience’s background knowledge and the impulsivity of readers’
interpretations. He, therefore, compares academic discourse on the Web
vs. offline to investigate the use and frequency of interpersonality markers
in academic communication: as the text becomes more digitalised,
common-­ground markers seem to decrease, while similes, boosters and
direct addresses to the audience increase. Interaction issues also emerge in
Bondi’s (2018) empirical study about reader engagement markers. In her
corpus-based examination of three economics blogs, the prominent use of
(a) reader engagement markers, (b) self-mentions as well as other (c) text-­
oriented and (d) action-oriented elements is a clear participant-oriented
dimension of posts, justified by the desire to guide readers through the
text, making sure the argument is understood and the writer’s position
and ideas are commonly shared along the whole spectrum of communica-
tion. Similarly, Zou and Hyland (2019) use the stance and engagement
model (cf. Hyland, 2005) in their corpus-based analysis to research blog
4 L. D’ANGELO AND S. MACI

posts and traditional journal research articles: their results suggest that
when academic research is recontextualised online, scholars create a differ-
ent writer persona and adopt different rhetorical choices.
These metadiscoursive studies have been the first ones to explore the
complex way academic discourse is realised on digital media, along with
the multiple facets of its genres and hybridised forms now available, which
have affected the way Academia communicates and the way academic
meaning is realised in a more widespread, less homogeneous, multimodal
environment, steering away from the common notion of an academy per-
ceived as an ‘ivory tower’, out of reach to a non-expert readership
(Puschmann, 2013). In this regard, as digital and social media have
acquired a more relevant role in our daily communication, academic (and
non-academic) communication practices have consequently adjusted.
Precisely because people create meaning through language and digital
resources, it is nowadays evident that the communicative immediacy of
digital media, alongside the spectrum of genres (and hybridised forms)
they create, rule the way meaning-making practices in a multimodal envi-
ronment are structured.
Six contributions in this direction are here contained, investigating pro-
gressively hybridised academic genres that have migrated—or are in the
process of migrating—from analogue to digital format. What clearly
emerges is that despite the ongoing and ever-increasing democratisation
and popularisation of knowledge that are being boosted by digital tech-
nology, the changing conventions of asymmetric, peer-to-peer scientific
communication are still a favourite area of research for metadiscourse
scholarship. Mauranen (Chap. 2), for example, after researching for years
discourse reflexivity in spoken dialogues and ascertaining that it diverges
considerably from metadiscourse in the written mode, considers here
research blog discussions, as they provide her with a combined perspective
on discourse reflexivity, one that is dialogic but also written. She finds
evidence that there is more open and direct evaluation in digital than spo-
ken dialogues, especially when participants engage in debates and negoti-
ate disagreement: a phenomenon that may only be interpreted by
considering the specific communicative affordances of online dialogicity.
She then reveals the limitations of monologue-based models and calls for
more adequate metadiscourse models to further the field of study. Finally,
she firmly believes that the greater explicitness found in digital forms of
communication, driven by many lingua franca situations, offers an ideal
opportunity for exploring metadiscourse as a potential discourse universal.
 1 METADISCOURSE IN DIGITAL COMMUNICATION: A SHORT… 5

Using Hyland’s (2005) model, Donatella Malavasi (Chap. 4) contrib-

utes to research on blogs by exploring interactive and interactional meta-
discourse markers in a selection of research articles and blog posts written
by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. In particular, with the support
of corpus linguistic tools, a sample of scientific papers and a collection of
posts published on the blog ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’ are analysed in
their metadiscourse devices. More to the point, the examination of some
key aspects sheds light on the metadiscourse devices used by Krugman in
blog posts vs. RAs to organise his texts and shape his arguments to the
needs and expectations of two presumably different target readerships.
Ylva Biri’s (Chap. 7) corpus-based analysis examines instead the usage
and functions of metadiscourse in English-speaking online communities.
She recognises that different social networking sites (SNSs) have different
technological features or affordances, which is why metadiscourse is here
considered in different settings. A working metadiscourse framework is
developed to illustrate how metadiscourse is used in 12 online communi-
ties, taken from 3 social media platforms—Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr—
and 4 polarised political topics of interest are considered: alt-right, red pill,
feminism and the resist movement.
Sancho-Guinda (Chap. 5) examines the visual abstract and its graphical
format. The author considers the role of visual and filmic metadiscourses
as ‘narrative transformers’ and regards ‘stylisation’ as a phenomenon inter-
estingly capable of enriching but also hindering scientific meaning. To this
end, Sancho-Guinda comments on samples from science blog archives and
JCR journals and draws on a mixed methodological framework, not only
comprising Hyland’s well-known metadiscourse model but also incorpo-
rating stimuli from critical genre analysis, multimodal and visual analysis,
social semiotics, narrative and positioning theories, and the conceptual
theory of metaphor. Her eclectic contribution is particularly relevant, we
believe, because it not only considers the regenring and transduction pro-
cesses that scientific information undergoes when it is transformed into a
condensed visual narrative but also attempts to tackle and categorise visual
metadiscourse, an area of research still under-represented (see, e.g.
D’Angelo, 2016; D’Angelo, 2018; De Groot et al., 2016; Fechine &
Pontes, 2012 & Kumpf, 2000) and which, in the times of increasing visu-
alisation and digitalisation we are facing, has become a necessary avenue of
research.
Delibegović Džanić’ and Berberović’s work (Chap. 6) solidly moves
instead away from a scriptocentric tradition, contributing to the theory of
6 L. D’ANGELO AND S. MACI

metadiscourse and to our understanding of the role metadiscourse and

related ‘meta’ phenomena may play in less researched digital forms of
communication. They analyse here text-image advertisements with idiom-
atic expressions with the aim of, on the one hand, investigating how visual
elements play a crucial role in understanding the cognitive and rhetorical
functions of advertisements, and on the other hand, of establishing to
what extent hidden cognitive mechanisms involved in the interpretation of
advertising can be explained using conceptual blending theory. This leads
to the idea that blending contributes to the creativity and effectiveness of
pictorial advertisements. As with Sancho-Guinda’s work, this is a most
welcome contribution, as it seeks to devise a much-needed framework of
visual metadiscoursive elements that, especially in digital genres, represent
significant meaning-making devices that cognitively and rhetorically com-
plement the accompanying text.
Ädel’s (Chap. 3) contribution is particularly representative of the
changes the field has undergone and the dive into deep waters we are wit-
nessing. In her work, we see her reflexive model (Ädel, 2006) revisited and
applied to a sample vlog (video blog), functioning as a case study. Through
in-depth qualitative analysis, the uses of metadiscourse in the vlog are
illustrated and neighbouring categories are pinpointed so that crucial
delimitations and differences between metadiscourse and related phenom-
ena emerge. What is particularly relevant here is that particular semiotic
resources, such as paralinguistic and visual cues, are used to support the
(verbal) metadiscourse investigated in vlogs. She coins the term ‘synchro-
nous intertextuality’ to refer to how the intertext (in this case, a simulator
game) is operating while the vlogger is interacting with it, revealing a very
different type of intertextuality than the one we usually see in academic
discourse.
We cannot but join Ädel when she concludes that a ‘new wave’ of
metadiscourse studies is envisioned for the future, where the research
focus moves more firmly from the non-propositional and interpersonal
to the reflexive. Such a move, we agree, would lead to a firmer ground-
ing of metadiscourse in the theory of reflexivity and to a deeper under-
standing of the sea change that, today more than ever, our culture is
undergoing.
 1 METADISCOURSE IN DIGITAL COMMUNICATION: A SHORT… 7

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 CHAPTER 2

“Gonna write about it on my blog too”

Metadiscourse in Research Blog Discussions

Anna Mauranen

Abstract Metadiscourse research has to a large extent emphasised the

interactive, interpersonal and dialogic facets of writing (e.g. Hyland,
Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Continuum, 2005). It is
therefore surprising that this research has focused virtually exclusively on
(1) written, usually academic texts and (2) monologues. The question
arises why an aspect of language that embodies dialogicity should be inves-
tigated through the most indirect route possible. Having studied discourse
reflexivity (or metadiscourse) in dialogic speech for a long time (e.g.
Mauranen, 2001; Mauranen, TESOL Quarterly, 37, 513–527, 2003;
2010) I have discovered that it diverges considerably from metadiscourse
in the written mode; not only in expressions used, but also in some central
functions. In this paper, I embrace the digital mode, which offers a com-
bined perspective on discourse reflexivity, one that is dialogic but also
written. I look into research blog dialogues, that is, their comment threads,
and compare their characteristics to spoken dialogue and monologue in

A. Mauranen (*)
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: anna.mauranen@helsinki.fi

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Switzerland AG 2021
L. D’Angelo et al. (eds.), Metadiscourse in Digital Communication,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85814-8_2
12 A. MAURANEN

academic contexts. The approach brings to light consequences of this

hybrid of writing and dialogue, resulting in a ‘third’ kind of usage where
both the mode and the discourse type contribute to the outcome.

Keywords Discourse reflexivity • Metadiscourse in digital dialogue •

Hybrid genres • Retrospective metadiscourse • Altercentric
metadiscourse

1   Introduction
Metadiscourse, or discourse reflexivity, is arguably a fundamental property
of human communication. Briefly, it means discourse about discourse, or
to paraphrase John Lyons (1977), ‘reflexivity’ is the capacity of natural
language to refer to or talk about itself. Along the same lines, I studied
metadiscourse as ‘text reflexivity’ (Mauranen, 1993a), and later (Mauranen,
2001, 2004), taking speech on board, as ‘discourse reflexivity’: text about
text, discourse about discourse. I am using the terms metadiscourse and
discourse reflexivity interchangeably in this paper, but since there are vari-
ous different conceptualisations of metadiscourse, I want to be clear about
the sense in which I use it. In this paper, then, the sense is ‘discourse about
the ongoing discourse’.
The prefix ‘meta’ is not unambiguous in itself. For instance, the meta-
language of mathematics refers to natural language being used to talk
about mathematics, which is of course not part of mathematics. By con-
trast, metacognition is part of cognition; it means the capacity of human
cognition to be aware of itself, to reflect on what is going on in our minds
and to monitor our thought processes for various purposes (e.g. Bandura,
2000). Metadiscourse in the sense of discourse reflexivity can be perceived
as discourse being aware of itself, as it were, and is clearly akin to metacog-
nition. There is no way of talking about language by getting ‘outside’
language any more than it is possible to get outside cognition to be aware
of cognition. Both are fundamental aspects of human language and cogni-
tion. It would seem that both are also species-specific, and thus something
that is distinctive of humans. Whether this really is so may not be easy to
demonstrate, but at least we can say is that it is characteristic of humans to
engage in reflexive activities like metacognition and metadiscourse.
Showing human distinctness from other species may not in any case be a
very important pursuit.
 2 “GONNA WRITE ABOUT IT ON MY BLOG TOO” METADISCOURSE… 13

Discourse about the ongoing discourse is a facet of intersubjectivity

which helps reduce uncertainty in communication between interlocutors
and enable fluent co-construction of meaning within the time constraints
and rapid alterations in dialogic speech. In written text, we can emulate
this interaction to a limited degree.
Metadiscourse rose to general awareness in Applied Linguistics during
the 1990s in the wake of the ‘interactional turn’ of analysing spoken lan-
guage that had started in the 1970s. Hallidayan ‘interpersonal function’ of
language was one source of inspiration, together with Sinclair and
Coulthard’s discourse analysis (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). In text analy-
sis, there was also a strong desire to break out of the limits of grammar and
get beyond the sentence in analysing written text (e.g. Enkvist, 1975;
Hoey, 1983). Swales (1981) was a trailblazer in English for Specific
Purposes, adapting Sinclair and Coulthard’s moves analysis to written aca-
demic texts. For metadiscourse specifically, important early models were
presented by Crismore (1983) and Vande Kopple (1985). In social and
behavioural sciences similar awareness of individual subjectivities altered
practices and norms not only in writing but also in how research was done.
Qualitative research and case studies suddenly mushroomed amidst the
previously dominating surveys and quantitative studies (at the time of
writing this, the tide has turned again very strongly in favour of quantita-
tive research in social sciences). Hyland (1998) was a great advocate of this
interpersonal approach, and later (Hyland, 2005) extended his hedge
studies to metadiscourse, much along the lines originally presented by
Crismore (1983, 1989) and Vande Kopple (1985), drawing on and
expanding their models.
Given the important roles that metadiscourse was shown to play in text,
including, and in particular, academic text types, as was suggested in
Crismore and Vande Kopple’s work on undergraduate texts, it felt natural
to explore the avenue of metadiscourse in academic writing further and go
beyond their focus to published research (e.g. Mauranen 1993a, b). The
interest turned out to be long-lasting, and has continued and even
expanded in this millennium, prime examples being books by Hyland
(2005) and Ädel (2006). About ten years after the publication of these
two books, the first international conference dedicated entirely to meta-
discourse took place in 2017 (see the Introduction to this volume).
Metadiscourse is generally accepted as being an interpersonal, dialogic
facet of language (see, e.g. Hyland, 2005; Ädel, 2006). It is therefore
quite puzzling that it has remained almost exclusively studied in the
14 A. MAURANEN

written text—or in monologue. It seems that the keen interest in written

texts heralded by Crismore & Vande Kopple left a more direct exploration
of spoken metadiscourse in its shadow, and it took longer for any research
in the spoken mode to emerge. One of the early exceptions was Luukka’s
(1995) comparison of spoken conference presentations to their written
versions, followed by Ädel’s (2010) work on spoken lectures and written
essays. However, both consisted in comparing monologic genres, and the
observed differences were consequently not remarkably large.
Investigating metadiscourse in dialogic speech has remained extremely
rare (see, however, Mauranen 2001, 2003, 2010), even though one might
think it would interest those wishing to dig deeper into the concept and
manifestations of interactionality in metadiscourse.
This paper draws its data from English as a Lingua Franca. The assump-
tion is that evidence from a lingua franca is particularly fitting for discover-
ing essential, possibly universal aspects of discourse. Conversing in a lingua
franca, participants must adapt to highly diverse and unpredictable cir-
cumstances while maintaining communicative efficiency, because quite
commonly they will be talking to strangers (although by no means always).
In such circumstances, speakers have less basis for educated guesses about
their interlocutor’s knowledge, world view, and language skills than can be
expected from conversations in more circumscribed communities.
Therefore, we can expect them to strive linguistically for the least common
denominator in their communication strategies (Mauranen, 2003) and
invest in recipient design strategies that emphasise explicitness (Mauranen,
2005; Seidlhofer, 2011), while leaving out from their English what
Trudgill (2011) called ‘historical baggage’. Features like irregularities,
exceptions and rare forms can be assumed to be relatively unimportant in
effective ELF communication, sometimes even dysfunctional, in the same
way as esoteric idioms or literary references can be. ELF, in brief, adapts
to the uses it is put to, and the contextual parameters of lingua franca
speech. Therefore, insofar as we find metadiscourse in ELF, we ought to
take note of it as a potential ‘discourse universal’ (Mauranen, 2003), that
is, something that is likely to be prevalent and favoured in human dis-
course on account of conferring communicative benefits.
In this paper, I explore metadiscourse in dialogic discourses. In the
spirit of the topic of the volume, I focus on discourse reflexivity in digital
dialogues, comparing them to monologues on the one hand, and spoken
dialogues on the other. The data is drawn from English as a Lingua Franca
in academic speech and digital writing. I will show that dialogic discourses
 2 “GONNA WRITE ABOUT IT ON MY BLOG TOO” METADISCOURSE… 15

differ radically from monologues, and that the mode (written vs. spoken)
also plays a role. I argue that metadiscourse research should indeed take
dialogue seriously if it wants to progress as a research field.

2   Metadiscourse as Discourse Reflexivity

One of the problems about the term—and concept—‘metadiscourse’ is
that it can be understood in either of the two senses outlined in the
Introduction: it can be taken to mean what the metalanguage of mathe-
matics means, that is, for talking about a particular object of academic
study, in our case language, and equally in everyday usage, for talking
about different languages, for example (my French is pretty limited), or,
say, what the norms of ‘good language’ are or ought to be. Used in this
sense there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Talking about lan-
guage is not substantially different from talking about music, bicycles,
biology or shoes. Alternatively, we can argue that the feat of using a system
of communication for commenting on the system itself is considerably
more sophisticated than talking about something that falls within the
range of the general referential possibilities that humans can talk about. In
the latter sense metadiscourse is comparable to metacognition, which
enables us to be aware, monitor, and manipulate our cognition while
engaging in cognitive activity. Importantly, we are capable of doing it—
indeed we have to do it—within the confines of cognition itself.
From reflexivity it follows also that the main focus of metadiscourse is
on the ongoing discourse, not some other talk about discourse. Consider
examples (1a) and (1b):

(1a) S1: … the difficulty I’m having is with these you you call these acknowledgement
tokens
S2: I don’t know how to call them actually
(1b) S1: …the newly industrialised countries like Taiwan and Singapore or Hong Kong
they they were able to do that miracle (S2: mhm-hm) the World Bank called it a
miracle industrialisation of those countries

Both examples come from conference discussions, and use the same
verb (call). In (1a) the speakers are talking about S2’s presentation that
has just ended, thus referring to the situation at hand, whereas in (1b) S1
is elaborating on his use of the label ‘miracle’ by invoking an outside
source. (1b) thus is not discourse reflexive.
16 A. MAURANEN

2.1  Discourse About the Ongoing Discourse

Beyond the basic difference of events falling within the present discourse
and those merely reported in it, we need to draw somewhat clearer bound-
aries around those events that can be considered ‘present’. One of the
determinants of events as perceived is their boundedness, typically spatio-
temporal boundedness (see Radvansky & Zacks, 2014). A pertinent prop-
erty of event boundary perception is their hierarchical nature: larger events
are perceived as consisting of smaller, also bounded events. Thus, whole
conferences can be perceived as possessing a certain spatiotemporal integ-
rity, and cross-references to talks within a conference (as we heard this
morning) do indeed occur as if to something in the same event. A similar
boundary issue arises with interlinked events like a university course such
as a seminar which takes place on a regular basis with the same participants
and typically the same location and counts as an entity in the education
system. Participants therefore refer to the previous and following sessions
within the same ‘macro event’ (2a, b):

(2a) S1: mhm the last presentation on on on Tuesday er we heard that there’s still a very
strong fixation in the region on on the nation state
(2b) S1: about the next session, do we have three presentations for the next presentation er
next session

Blog comment threads are even more dispersed in spatiotemporal terms

than university courses but are interconnected through links to each other
or to the same blog post (mostly to the blog, cf. Mahrt & Puschmann,
2014). In this way, we can draw boundaries around one event, within
which the discourses count as ‘present”: they are interlinked either by time
and space, or they are interconnected through other, for instance social,
links through which they are perceived as one entity. We could say that
conferences, university courses and blog threads illustrate macro events in
what we might call ‘discourse time’. Events can also be segmented further
on the shorter time scales that make up the larger events, and discourse
reflexivity can play many roles at any level.
Reflexivity contributes a distinct element of sophistication to language.
It allows us to perform various complex actions that go far beyond con-
veying referential information about states of affairs. It helps us express
ourselves in a more subtle or a more direct manner, to navigate discourse
time, and to relate our talk or text to those of others. Some typical ways in
 2 “GONNA WRITE ABOUT IT ON MY BLOG TOO” METADISCOURSE… 17

which discourse reflexivity achieves things that go beyond the referential

uses of language are shown below with examples from digital dialogues in
blog comment threads.
First of all, discourse reflexivity enables us to indicate explicitly how we
wish our talk to be taken, as in (3).

(3) Not defending the WPI or Dr. Mikovits or attacking you personally, but I believe this
has all been handled very badly on many sides

Or, as in (4), how what we are saying relates to our interlocutors’ talk.

(4) I absolutely agree with you that a language is more than…

Reflexive discourse also enables us to comment on our upcoming

speech, for example, by assessing its importance:

(5) However it is important to mention that some information escapes from the hand of
science

It allows us to move backwards in discourse time, if not in real time,

enabling us to try to make amends and to say that although we said some-
thing, we did not really mean it in the way it was taken, as in (6a and 6b).

(6a) What I meant was following these cohorts in real time instead of retrospectively
(6b) What I was trying to ask you, and apparently not being very clear about, is, would
you please continue to …

Importantly, moving backwards in discourse time enables discourse

reflexivity to be used for commenting on each other’s (7) talk in retrospect.

(7) …lifelong grad-schooler and research-lover, I think you’re right when you say “I also
think that PhD’s…

Uses of the above kinds are generally seen as helpful to the recipient of
the discourse, by which the speaker or writer can assist the reader to navi-
gate through the text. At the same time, however, it is important to bear
in mind that discourse reflexivity imposes the speaker’s perspective on the
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