Metadiscourse Across Discourses: A Cross-Cultural Review of Current Trends and Future Directions

Abstract

This paper provides a cross-cultural review of metadiscourse research, focusing on its application and development in academic discourse, media discourse, and business discourse. As a linguistic tool, metadiscourse helps authors organize text content and interact with readers, reflecting the author’s stance and discourse structure. The paper reviews early definitions of metadiscourse and its theoretical development, particularly Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse framework, and analyzes the use of metadiscourse across different discourse types. The study finds that the use of metadiscourse in academic discourse varies significantly across disciplines, while media discourse shows significant cross-cultural differences. In business discourse, metadiscourse is primarily used to construct corporate image and engage with the audience. Additionally, the paper explores metadiscourse research from a cross-cultural perspective and discusses metadiscourse adaptation in translation studies. Finally, the paper identifies gaps in current research and suggests that future studies should further explore the role of metadiscourse in digital media and multimodal discourse.