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2 Theoretical framework

2.2 Theory of metadiscourse

2.2.2 The propositional dichotomy

In defining metadiscourse, Vande Kopple (1985) claimed that language can be considered to carry either propositional or non-propositional meaning. Since metadiscoursal features are used to signal textual relations and to maintain writer-reader relations, Vande Kopple considered them to be secondary to a text’s main message and therefore ascribed them with non-propositional status. This view is based on the three metafunctions of language outlined by Halliday and Matthiessen5 (2014): the ideational, the textual and the interpersonal. The ideational metafunction, which encompasses propositional (i.e.

non-5 Vande Kopple does not clearly define the term “propositional” himself, relying instead on Halliday and Mattiessen’s definition of the ideational metafunction.

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metadiscoursal; Vande Kopple, 1985) material, refers to aspects of language that “construe[.] human experience” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014, p. 30). In other words, it is that which names concrete objects and abstract concepts and conveys the content of what one wishes to communicate. The latter two metafunctions were the point of departure for operationalising metadiscourse (Vande Kopple, 1985): the textual metafunction refers to linguistic aspects that organise the message one wishes to convey; the interpersonal metafunction refers to aspects that writers use to establish their position and anticipate the views of their readers. The textual metafunction can be likened to signposting features and the interpersonal metafunction to stance features.

When taken a priori, the distinction between propositional and non-propositional language seems a logical one. However, when putting it into practice, analysing what does and what does not carry propositional meaning is more problematic (e.g. Hyland, 2019; Ifantidou, 2005). For example, the phrase “In this paper, I will discuss” contains three metadiscourse markers (“paper” is a topic marker”; “I” is a self-mention”; “will discuss” is a phoric marker). However, these markers have clear denotative meaning: “paper” refers to the text in question, “I”

refers to the writer, and “discuss” refers to the speech act taking place.

Thus, considering that a number of metadiscourse markers can be considered to carry propositional meaning, applying the non-propositional criterion when conducting a textual analysis becomes problematic.

There seem to be three trends in dealing with this dichotomy in the metadiscourse literature. The first is simply to tacitly accept Vande Kopple’s (1985) distinction (e.g. Dahl, 2004; Intraprawat & Steffensen, 1995). The second is to try to delineate more clearly what is and what is not propositional (Khabbazi-Oskouei, 2013). The third is to redefine metadiscourse in a way that rejects the propositional vs. non-propositional dichotomy (e.g. Ifantidou, 2005). The following sections take a closer look at how these trends are manifested in the literature.

29 Accepting the propositional dichotomy

Vande Kopple (1985, p. 83) offered the following definition of metadiscourse:

On one level we supply information about the subject of our text. On this level we expand propositional content. On the other level, the level of metadiscourse, we do not add propositional material but help our readers organise, classify, interpret, evaluate, and react to such material.

Metadiscourse, therefore, is discourse about discourse or communication about communication.

In other words, Vande Kopple considers propositional information to be the main message one wishes to convey, while non-propositional information aids the reader in interpreting this material. This definition has since been adopted in numerous metadiscourse-related studies (e.g.

Dafouz Milne, 2008; Dahl, 2004; Intraprawat & Steffensen, 1995).

While these studies provide important contributions to the field, none of them provide criteria specifically for recognising non-propositional language features. This is problematic when considering that several metadiscourse categories (e.g. self-mentions) clearly carry denotative, propositional meaning. This raises the question of how strictly these researchers have applied Vande Kopple’s distinction. Did they omit from their analyses instances of metadiscourse that carry propositional meaning? Or did they tacitly accept the definition without fully considering its practical implications? The analytical frameworks used in these studies would suggest the latter. For example, in a study of newspaper discourse, Dafouz-Milne (2008) argued that columnists’ use of metadiscourse is auxiliary to the propositional material. However, her ensuing analysis considered second person pronouns to be features of metadiscourse. In directly addressing the reader, second person pronouns have a discernible referent, which thus undermines ascribing them with non-propositional status. While these studies adopted the propositional

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dichotomy in defining metadiscourse, they did not seem to consider its implications in practice.

Redefining the propositional dichotomy

The second approach is to elaborate on how metadiscourse can be operationalised using the propositional/non-propositional dichotomy.

This approach is represented particularly by Khabbazi-Oskouei (2013), who not only addressed the distinction, but also proposed an innovative taxonomy. Khabbazi-Oskouei (2013, p. 94) acknowledged that there are a host of expressions that may carry metadiscoursal meaning in some situations, but not in others. For example, the word “first” would function as a metadiscourse marker in the phrase “my first argument is” in that it helps to organise the writer’s arguments. On the other hand, in the phrase

“the first person across the line”, the word “first”, by describing a temporal order, carries a text-external denotation. These considerations thus require a researcher to account for the polysemic nature of language by considering how certain markers contribute to the overall message.

Following this, Khabbazi-Oskouei (2013, p. 95) argued that, although language can be seen as carrying either propositional or non-propositional meaning, this distinction manifests as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. Thus, metadiscourse encompasses both propositional and non-propositional linguistic features. Khabbazi-Oskouei claimed that the reason that metadiscourse is associated with non-propositional material is because “there is a great deal of overlap in the range of items that fall into the non-propositional end of the propositional/non-propositional continuum” (p. 95). By recognising that metadiscourse features can also be considered as propositional, she accounted for categories that clearly denote real-world entities, such as self-mentions. To illustrate how some metadiscourse may be propositional, Khabbazi-Oskouei provides the following example (p.

94):

31 1) Really, it was terrible.

2) It was really terrible.

In the first example, Khabbazi-Oskouei argued that “really” adds no propositional information to the statement. In contrast, the second example has propositional value in that it intensifies the meaning of the adjective “terrible”. In practice, by recognising that metadiscourse can carry propositional information, both instances would be included in an analysis of metadiscourse as both propositional and non-propositional:

the former as an attitude marker and the latter as a booster. Accordingly, Khabbazi-Oskouei (2013, p. 101) proposed a “propositional and non-propositional continuum”, a model that shows the degree to which each metadiscourse category is either propositional or non-propositional.

However, when putting this continuum into practice, it remains unclear how propositional and non-propositional language should be distinguished. Taking one example from Khabbazi-Oskouei’s continuum, attitude markers can be either propositional or non-propositional depending on their sentential placement. They are considered to be non-propositional when separated from the clause, but propositional when integrated into the clause (Khabbazi-Oskouei, 2013, p. 99). Thus, the attitude marker “extraordinarily” would be non-propositional in the sentence: “Extraordinarily, the wrong person was elected”. In contrast, the attitude marker “extraordinary” would be propositional in “It was an extraordinary election”. In both cases, these attitude markers modify the statement by establishing the writer’s emotional reaction towards events during an election. It therefore seems fallacious to distinguish the former as non-propositional and the latter as propositional according to their sentential placement. Consequently, it seems that reconceptualising the propositional dichotomy as a continuum remains problematic for the purposes of conducting corpus-assisted studies.

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Another issue arises when using Khabbazi-Oskouei’s propositional continuum to analyse metadiscoursal features. This concerns how one can distinguish metadiscourse from other discoursal elements. If metadiscourse can encompass both propositional and non-propositional meaning, the distinction between propositional and non-propositional seems to be redundant as a criterion for recognising metadiscoursal features. In other words, Khabbazi-Oskouei seemed only to address this issue in terms of defining metadiscourse in itself, but not in terms of how metadiscourse relates to other features of language. In practice, this continuum does not delineate where metadiscourse ends and where non-metadiscourse begins.

Rejecting the propositional dichotomy

The third approach is to recognise the impracticalities of defining metadiscourse based on what is and what is not propositional. This approach has taken a variety of forms, involving both reworked definitions and innovative operationalisations. This discussion will limit itself to just two of these (Hyland, 2019; Ädel, 2006).

In redefining metadiscourse, Hyland (2019) argued against using the propositional dichotomy as a criterion for identifying metadiscoursal features. Firstly, by classing metadiscourse as non-propositional, one assigns it a secondary role. In other words, one would ascribe varying levels of status to individual aspects of language. However, such a hierarchy would ignore the essential role that metadiscourse plays in communicating a message. Instead, Hyland (2019, p. 23) contended that hierarchies are unnecessary: “metadiscourse can [...] both be of equal importance to what is asserted and overlap with it”. Furthermore, all aspects of language can convey propositional meaning, “with each element expressing its own “content”: one concerned with the world and the other with the text and its reception” (Hyland & Tse, 2004, p. 24).

Thus, the propositional dichotomy does not provide a logical set of

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criteria that can be used to distinguish metadiscourse from other linguistic features.

In a similar vein, Ifantidou (2005) argued that metadiscourse cannot be non-propositional since it has implications for truth-value. For example, the hedge “maybe” has fundamental implications as to how a statement should be interpreted. On the one hand, saying “it’s blue” implies that a speaker is making an observation, whereas saying “maybe it’s blue”

implies that a speaker is offering a speculation. Taking another example, a writer may choose to add information using transitions such as, “in addition”, “also”, or “moreover”. While these transitions are synonymous, using a transition of comparison would change the way in which links would be understood. Saying “in addition, it’s blue” would imply that observations are being consolidated, but saying “on the other hand, it’s blue” would imply that observations are being contrasted. If a speaker intends to signal a relation of addition and uses a phrase such as

“on the other hand”, the listener would almost inevitably misinterpret the message (Rooij, 2012). Finally, Mao (1993) observed that metadiscourse can also contribute to the truth value of speech-acts that writers perform. For example, if one presents a well-known fact with the phrase “I hypothesise”, the act of hypothesising becomes untrue (Mao, 1993, p. 266).

Instead of ascribing metadiscourse with secondary, non-falsifiable, or non-propositional status, it is more pertinent to identify its communicative functions. Hyland’s (2019, p. 43) definition recognised the specific communicative functions that metadiscourse fulfils without leaning on unverifiable criteria:

Metadiscourse is the cover term for the self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community.

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Following this, Hyland (2019, p. 41) rejected Vande Kopple’s (1985) use of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) metafunctions (the ideational, textual, and interpersonal) as criteria for distinguishing ideational material from textual and interpersonal metadiscourse. Hyland argued that this distinction is flawed since all metadiscourse can be considered to be interpersonal. Although what Vande Kopple labelled as interpersonal metadiscourse explicitly positions the writer and reader in relation to the material in question, textual metadiscourse plays an essential part in guiding the reader through the unfolding text by linking ideas and framing textual events. Accordingly, Hyland (2019) offered an operationalisation of metadiscourse that relabelled interpersonal and textual metadiscourse, using the terms “interactional” and “interactive”

metadiscourse, respectively (Thompson & Theleta, 1995).

Ädel (2006, p. 209-212) also rejected the propositional dichotomy, arguing, in a similar line of reasoning, that metadiscourse carries propositional content: “[i]nstead of defining metadiscourse in terms of truth-conditional semantics, we can find a more useful definition by focusing on its linguistic functions”. However, while Hyland’s (2019) approach is to reimplement Vande Kopple’s (1985) model, Adel’s reflexive model takes an alternative point of departure by drawing on Jakobson’s (1990) theory of language. This will be further discussed in section 2.2.3.

This study subscribes to rejecting the propositional dichotomy as an approach to categorising metadiscourse features. Instead of trying to distinguish what does and does not carry propositional meaning, this study follows approaches that recognise metadiscourse as fulfilling a fixed set of linguistic functions (e.g. Hyland, 2019; Mao, 1993; Ädel, 2006). These approaches arguably offer a more logical and robust set of criteria that can be more readily applied to a textual analysis. This is particularly relevant when analysing pre-tertiary essay writing, which may contain, for example, lexical and spelling errors. Thus, instead of trying to distinguish propositional and non-propositional material, it was

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considered more manageable to analyse how individual types functioned in their respective contexts.