Engagement Markers

Engagement markers are defined as devices that “explicitly address readers, either to focus their attention or include them as discourse participants” (Hyland 2005, p. 53). Two main purposes are distinguished: firstly, to meet readers’ expectations of inclusion and disciplinary solidarity, addressing them as participants in the discourse (mainly by the pronouns you, your and inclusive we); secondly, to engage readers in the discourse at critical points, predicting possible objections and guiding them to particular interpretations (by questions and directives such as note, consider) (Hyland 2005). Table 3 shows an overall distribution of engagement markers in the undergraduate textbooks and research articles in the corpus.

The most common device functioning as an engagement marker is the pronoun we (inclusive we, but see below), accounting for approximately 70% of engagement markers in both genres, and it will thus be the main focus of this study. The other engagement markers included the second person pronouns, questions, imperatives and various comments whose function is to address readers as participants; they will be discussed shortly in the following passage. Hyland’s list of engagement markers also includes obligation modals; however, these were mostly regarded as attitude markers in the analysis since they often seem to express the writer’s attitude to

Table 3 Engagement markers in undergraduate textbooks and research articles

Table 4 Distribution of engagement markers (EM) in undergraduate textbooks (raw number/ number per 1000 words)

Table 5 Distribution of engagement markers (EM) in research articles (raw number/number per 1000 words)

propositions, as in the following sentence: “Clearly, these findings need to be verified with much larger corpora.” (RA4) It is true that certain structures with obligation modals, such as “It should be noted that”, are aimed at readers, signalling that an important point is coming, but since they do not address readers explicitly, they were not regarded as engagement markers but rather as attitude markers, expressing emphasis.

As for the distribution of engagement markers, the individual textbooks and RAs differed in their use (see Tables 4 and 5 ). Two textbook authors used them occasionally while four of them frequently engaged readers in their texts, mainly by means of personal pronouns. It is interesting to note that RAs also differed in their use; three articles published in the Journal of Pragmatics (RA6, RA7, RA8; see Table 5 below) included an overwhelming majority of engagement markers - 232 out of the total 271, which makes 86%. It could be argued that not only disciplinary conventions, but also the house style of the journal affects the use of metadiscourse. It is possible that the papers in the Journal of Pragmatics, which addresses “a number of questions that are essential to our understanding of how language works in communicative and social interaction”,² are more likely to contain engagement markers, especially inclusive we. The corpus is, however, too small to draw any general conclusions.