The cooperative principle in discourse communities and genres: A framework for the use of metadiscourse

Developments in characterizing discourse communities and their various genres are hoped to provide more insight into the nature of language in use. Such characterizations gradually tend to include the rhetorical and less visible aspects of different genres in different discourse communities. The trend seems rewarding due to the multilingual membership in discourse communities and inevitability of interference from speech communities. Although several studies have tried to describe the distribution and nature of metadiscourse marking across disciplines and languages, no systematic attempt was made, to our knowledge, to introduce a practical model that presumably guides the users in the real time of writing. By analyzing metadiscourse samples from the genre of research article of academic discourse community, this study embarks on introducing a tentative model based on Gricean cooperative principle (CP) that is hoped to help the multilingual members of academic discourse community in the use of metadiscourse markers. The Gricean categories of CP, developed here, are hoped to provide a practical framework that informs how to use rather than how is it used of metadiscourse in writing research articles. Such a model can be assumed an improvement against coarse-grained holistic guides for the use of metadiscourse offered by previous studies. The attempt also led to a new Classification of metadiscourse and added two new metadiscourse strategies of collapsers and disclaimers. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.