The Use of Metadiscourse: An Analysis of Interactive and Interactional Markers in English Short Stories as a Type of Literary Genre

The present study investigated the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in short storiesas a kind of literary genre and how these markers are used by short story writers to producepersuasive texts. It is a pioneering study, since very few studies in the literature tackled literarygenre and no study involved analyzing short stories. The corpus of 88,940 words consisted of 18short story texts written by the three famous American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain andRaymond Carver. To analyze this corpus, Hyland’s (2005) comprehensive model of metadiscoursewas used. Results of the study indicated that metadiscourse markers are employed by short storywriters to produce coherent texts and to make their stories persuasive. These results agreed withthose of previous studies that involved literary texts indicating that metadiscourse markers areused frequently in such texts. The study findings proved that short stories are considered aspersuasive texts not only due to non-linguistic factors, such as transportation, but also due to alinguistic one, namely, the use of metadiscourse markers. This finding is the most significant one,since it refutes the opinion that short stories are persuasive texts solely due to transportation andother similar factors.