The Use of Meta-discourse An Analysis of Interactive and Interactional Markers in English Short Stories as a Type of Literary Genre

Abstract

The present study investigated the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in short stories as a kind of literary genre and how these markers are used by short story writers to produce persuasive texts. It is a pioneering study, since very few studies in the literature tackled literary genre and no study involved analyzing short stories. The corpus of 88,940 words consisted of 18 short story texts written by the three famous American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Raymond Carver. To analyze this corpus, Hyland’s (2005) comprehensive model of metadiscourse was used. Results of the study indicated that metadiscourse markers are employed by short story writers to produce coherent texts and to make their stories persuasive. These results agreed with those of previous studies that involved literary texts indicating that metadiscourse markers are used frequently in such texts. The study findings proved that short stories are considered as persuasive texts not only due to non-linguistic factors, such as transportation, but also due to a linguistic 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 and other similar factors.