2024 年 5 月 第 47 卷 第 2 期 中国应用语言学 （英文） Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics May 2024 Vol. 47 No. 2 ISSN 2192-9505 Chinese J. of Appl. Ling. 47-2 (2024), pp. 163-177 DOI 10.1515/CJAL-2024-0201 © BFSU, FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy Metadiscourse in a Disciplinary Context: An Overview Feng (Kevin) JIANG Jilin University Erdem AKBAŞ Erciyes University, Türkiye 1. Introduction Central to successful communication is an integration of talk about the experiential world and how this is made coherent, intelligible and persuasive to a particular readership. Metadiscourse equips us to achieve this interactivity. Simply, metadiscourse captures the ways writers organize their texts to help readers interpret, evaluate, and react to the propositional information they supply (Hyland, 2005a; Jiang, 2022; Jiang & Hyland, 2018). In other words, the involved parties of communication build a relationship and engage through the set of functional metadiscourse units (Akbaş & Hatipoğlu, 2018). It is now a widely used term in current linguistic analysis, pragmatics and discourse studies, and has grown tremendously over the past 40 years. To illustrate the growth in the field, a topic search by us as of early 2022 on Scopus returns about 620 papers, and Google Scholar contains a surprising number of 25, 600 documents on the topic. Noticing the amount of efforts made by various researchers in different contexts, a number of consecutive conferences uniquely dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge on metadiscourse have been held (see Metadiscourse Across Genres [MAG] 2017, Cyprus; MAG 2019, Italy; MAG 2021, Spain as well as Metadiscourse Across Languages and Contexts [MALC] 2019, China). By connecting academics who are into researching metadiscourse and related concepts across genres, languages and contexts, these conferences have undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of the field by welcoming new researchers and topics into the field. Metadiscourse therefore seems to have found its time, and welcomes an updated focused discussion which well situates its use across different languages, registers and genres. The idea which underpins the use of metadiscourse is a writer’s orientation to his or her material and his or her readers informed by “recipient design”, or how communication is shaped to make sense to the current interactants (Blokpoel et al., 2012). This social constructivist view values a contrastive perspective on metadiscourse which investigates both synchronically across discourse communities and diachronically across critical periods of time. By such a contrastive investigation, we are in a better position to understand the inexorable influence of textual and social contexts on rhetorical language use. As Wang and 163