Hyland's Metadiscourse Analysis

INTRODUCTION
It is generally agreed upon that people use language to convey both referential information and "create and sustain expressive meanings"(Malinowski, 1930, p. 231). Academic discourse, as a kind of communication, is no exception.According to Hyland (2004), academic writers do not just produce texts which represent an external reality, but use language to offer a credible representation of their work and themselves and Hyland's view, metadiscourse is based on a view of writing as a social and communicative engagement and, in academic contexts, shows the ways writers project themselves into their argumentation in order to control their interactive intentions and signal their perspectives and commitments. In so doing, writers try to

133).Metadiscourse markers are one of the rhetorical tools that make a text reader-friendly and as such enable the writer to reach the audience.Vande Koppel (1985) suggests that metadiscourse conveys textual and interpersonal meanings. Interpersonal metadiscourse "helps writers express their personalities, their evaluations of and attitudes towards ideational material, show what role in the communication situation they are choosing, and indicate how they hope readers will respond to the ideational material" (VandeKoplle, 1985, p. 2-3). Textual metadiscourse helps writers

Harwood (2005) conducted a qualitative corpus-based study of self-promotional “I” and “we”in academic writing across four disciplines. while Vazquez and Giner (2008)carried out a cross-disciplinary study of the use of epistemic stance markers as hedging rhetorical strategies in research articles in English. Abdollahzadeh (2011) worked on hedges, emphatics, and attitude markers as three types of interactional metadiscourse markers in 60 conclusion sections of applied linguistics research articles.
Metadiscourse is defined here as those aspects of the text which explicitly refer to the organization of the discourse or the writer's stance towards either its content or the reader. Various definitions have been given for stance. Biber, Johannson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999) considered stance as the speakers’ or writers’ personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments. The term ‘writer stance’ involves, among other things, the communication of assessments and value judgments concerning the described situation by appeal to evidence, expression of degree of certainty or likelihood, as well as arguments regarding the necessity or desirability of the situation obtaining. According to Biber (2006),stance expressions can convey many different kinds of personal feelings