The importance of studying metadiscourse

This essay focuses on metadiscourse, a name for elements of texts that convey meanings other than those that are primarily referential. The essay provides some theoretical background to the study of metadiscourse, briefly reviews a taxonomy of metadiscourse, and explores four reasons why the study of metadiscourse is interesting and important: (a) Such study shows how intricately structured language is; (b) Such study opens up intriguing questions about ethics and language use; (c) Such study reveals differences in how metadiscourse is used in similar texts in different languages; (d) an‎d such study provides reasons why metadiscourse deserves a special place in second-language instruction.