The expression of interpersonal metadiscourse in English and Czech academic texts

This MA thesis explores the means of expressing interpersonal function in Czech and English academic texts. These expressions are found at various levels (e.g. lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical) and our classification takes into account both formal and functional point of view. From the various approaches to meadiscourse we have chosen the integrative approach subsuming both interpersonal and textual features of metadiscouse. However, this thesis focuses mainly on the interpersonal features. In the first part of the thesis, a detailed analysis of four academic texts was performed in order to get a range of expressions for the controlling search. The aim of the controlling search was to verify the findings from the detailed analysis and to find out to what extent the selected expressions were represented in a larger set of data. For this search we gathered twenty academic articles dealing with linguistics, ten per each language. Despite the different language types, Czech and English use similar means to express interpersonal features of metadiscourse. The greatest difference was found in the category of relational markers and self-mentions, other categories displayed relatively similar frequencies. Key words: metadiscourse, interpersonal function, Czech, English, academic register,..