Functional Analysis of Reflexive Metadiscourse in Dissertation Defense Sessions

Metadiscourse as one of the pivotal multifunctional linguistic features in spoken and written discourse has been investigated from two points of view; narrow and broad. In narrow point of view of metadiscourse, reflexivity in discourse is focused. Among the two points of view of metadiscourse, reflexivity is mostly used in spoken discourse, thus this study aims to trace the realization of functions of reflexivity metadiscourse in PhD dissertation sessions. To meet this end, four PhD dissertation defense sessions (totally ۵۶۸۳۷ words) were selected to make the corpus of this study. The transcription of the four sessions were analyzed for reflexive metadiscourse markers functions based on the model that includes four functional categories; “metadiscourse comments”, “discourse organization”, “speech act labels”, and “references to the audiences.”  The results showed that disciplinary speaking conventions have the most pivotal and significant impose on speakers to use categories of reflexive metadiscourse. For instance, it was found that in defense session on “Fosil Plant”, the “reference to audience” was the most frequent category while in defense session on “Music”, the “metalinguistic comments” has received the greatest attention for speakers. Findings of this study could contribute to the existing literature by helping EFL PhD candidates to understand and appropriately use reflexive metadiscourse markers.