Metadiscourse in Academic Speech: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

metadiscourse. This book studies spoken metadiscourse in two academic genres within the engineering field, the lecture and the peer seminar. It examines how engineering academics use metadiscourse when speaking to two different audiences and what motivates it, and based on Relevance Theory (RT) it provides a socio-cognitive framework for its analysis. This theoretical perspective provides a novel insight into motivations, abilities and preferences of engineering academics when using metadiscourse in the two aforementioned genres, as stated in the book introduction. The aim of chapter one, “Exploring Discourse”, is twofold. First, it acts as an introductory overview on discourse analysis. In order to achieve this goal, it studies three relevant issues in this field: communication, meaning and context, and cohesion and coherence to then discuss the core properties of language and discourse. Secondly, it critically examines RT. After dealing with the two Principles of Relevance (PR), the author goes on to remark the major weaknesses of Sperber and Wilson’s approach, mainly based on the neglect of social and emotional elements of verbal communication, such as time, “the kind and amount of information, the degree of alertness, the relationship between communicator and audience, the circumstances and social occasions ” (page 42), and speaker’s purposes, preferences and abilities. While it is true that some of these aspects may need more fleshing out – for instance, the role the speaker plays in guiding the hearer through the inferential process or their preferences and abilities –, it is also true that most of those aspects have been thoroughly discussed in some papers such as