The nature of interaction between authors and readers of written texts varies from language to language. This is particularly evident in specialized texts and their translations. Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani unveils the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as the writer-reader interaction in translations of legal and political texts in an English-Persian context. Using a corpus-based methodology and resorting to parallel and reference corpora, he explores systematically the use of metadiscourse features and their distribution in original texts and in translations in English and Persian. In addition, parallel concordance lines are used to examine the way writer-reader interaction is constructed and guided in translation and non-translation language in English and Persian.

First released in 2005, Ken Hyland's Metadiscourse has become a canonical account of how language is used in written communication. 'Metadiscourse' is defined as the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. It is a key resource in language as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways and as such it is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book achieves for main goals: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers The book shows how writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. It shows how these tools help the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis and this book makes this a central goal.

The nature of interaction between authors and readers of written texts varies from language to language. This is particularly evident in specialized texts and their translations. Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani unveils the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as the writer-reader interaction in translations of legal and political texts in an English-Persian context. Using a corpus-based methodology and resorting to parallel and reference corpora, he explores systematically the use of metadiscourse features and their distribution in original texts and in translations in English and Persian. In addition, parallel concordance lines are used to examine the way writer-reader interaction is constructed and guided in translation and non-translation language in English and Persian.

Stance refers to the ways academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible accuracy or creditability of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition or the reader. Stance concerns writer-oriented features of interaction which can be presented by four interpersonal categories. These categories are boosters, e.g. 'must, clearly', hedges, e.g. 'may, possibly', self-mentions, e.g. 'I, me' and attitude markers, e.g. 'interesting, surprisingly'. Stance features between L1 and L2 writers have been investigated by several researchers highlighting how L2 writers have adopted similar/different stance from their L1 peers. Most research attributed the differences of quantities and types of stance markers between native and non-native English writers to their culture. While these explanations could be reasonable, they appear to be intuition-based as these studies have been quantitative-based, examining writers' stance from the view that texts are an artefact of activity, independent of specific contexts and outside the personal experiences of authors and audience, and dealing with culture from its static meaning rather than viewing culture as dynamic which may inform more detailed information about writer's motivations and reasons for using metadiscourse markers.Accordingly, there is a need for more qualitative research to better understand L1 and L2 text writers' thoughts, routines and strategies when using certain markers, and how their lexical choices meet their readers' expectations. There is also a need to collect feedback from the expert audience on how they see successful/less successful stance patterns in academic texts. Therefore, this book is based on research that fills in this gap; a mixed-method approach was applied by first examining quantitatively two corpora of texts: one by native English writers and the other by EFL writers native of Arabic. And then, discourse-based interviews were conducted, first, with some of the text writers to report on their perceptions to use certain stance markers, and second, with expert academic audience to characterise successful / less successful features of stance-taking in English academic writing.

This book focuses on the idea of Academic Persian in the growing competition of many Middle Eastern languages to produce and highlight their academic discourse. Similar to academic English, most West Asian languages including Persian, Turkish, and Arabic are developing new styles and genres to produce academic texts. The book addresses a major question: "What is academic Persian?" Intended for researchers, experts, analysts, policy-makers, and students in Persian, Iranian studies, and Islamic studies, as well as Near Eastern languages and Middle Eastern cultures and languages, the book includes numerous technical contributions on the emerging markets involving west Asian languages. Since indexing, abstracting, crawling, metrics, citations, and visibility are becoming hot issues for academics, service providers (e.g., publishers) and policy-makers (e.g., university heads), a knowledge of academic Persian will help readers to grasp what Persian, and other similar languages, require in academic markets.

The pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse – commentary on the ongoing discourse – is beginning to take its rightful place among the major topics of discourse studies. This book makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of metadiscourse, corpus-based methods of studying such phenomena, and our knowledge of metadiscourse use in written English. After comprehensively reviewing previous research, it introduces a more rigorous and empirical approach to metadiscourse studies. Ädel presents a new model of metadiscourse based on Jakobson’s functions of language, and other conceptual tools, including explicit features for defining metadiscourse, a taxonomy of the functions it serves, and maps of the boundaries between it and related phenomena. A large-scale study of writing by L1 and L2 university students is presented, in which the L2 speakers’ overuse of metadiscourse strongly marks them as lacking in communicative competence. This work is of interest both to linguists and to educators concerned with writing in English.