A Content Analysis of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Regarding Metadiscourse Elements

Metadiscourse is an appealing field of inquiry which plays an important role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. The fuzziness of the term Metadiscourse remains obscure as it is seen in the literature. Having based this work on Ken Hyland’s framework for Metadiscourse, the researchers applied his definition and classification of the term. Hyland describes Metadiscourse as the linguistic resources used to organize a discourse or the writer’s stance towards either its content or the reader. He has divided Metadiscourse into two broad groups: Interactive and Interactional. The former being subcategorized into: Transitions, Frame markers, Endophoric markers, Evidentials, and Code-glosses. And the later being divided into Hedges, Boosters, Attitude markers, Engagement markers, and Self-mentions (Hyland, 2005). Focusing on these categorizations, the researchers would try to shed light on the Metadiscourse features applied in “Alice in Wonderland”, selected from the ‘Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll’, and see how and to what extent Lewis Carroll has applied these Metadiscourse markers to make his story more impressive and persuasive. Of course, Hedges have not been counted in this novel because of the many works done about this marker earlier. The results of the study showed that the frequencies in Interactive/Interactional Metadiscourse groups have no meaningful differences. However, the frequencies demonstrate that the author has been fully aware of the norms of writing. The results of the study have pedagogical implications for teaching English Literature for literature students and language learners at pre-, upper-, and highintermediate levels of language learning courses.


Introduction
The aim for academic discourse studies is to characterize written discourse on the basis of a set of an inspired criteria like a covert interaction (Widdowson, 1984), appraisal (Martin, 2000), a site for interaction (Hoey, 2001), operating under the principle of reciprocity and communicative homeostasis (Duszak, 1994), a stage-managed form of dialogue (Thompson, 2001), evaluation (Hunston, 2000), etc.
Metadiscourse is an abstract term and can be understood by various linguistic forms.It is also a 'pragmatic construct' and performs some 'rhetorical actions'.According to Hyland (2005), "the significance of Metadiscourse lies in its role in explicating a context for interpretation and indicating one way which acts of communication define and maintain social groups"(p.16).Hyland (2000Hyland ( & 2005) ) has probably provided the most comprehensive framework for the study of Metadiscourse.He has divided Metadiscourse expressions into two macro-categories: interactive and interactional.Interactive expressions, according to him, are applied in the organization of propositional information in ways that a projected target audience is likely to find coherent and persuasive.The interactional dimension concerns the ways writers conduct interaction by intruding and commenting on their message.Accordingly, writers and readers negotiate their meanings, and use interpersonal resources to organize texts coherently and convey their credibility, personality, and reader sensitivity and relationship to the message (Hyland, 2005).In a more serious vein, Hyland argues that writers do more than just creating texts in which they display an external reality.They also negotiate the status of their claims, balance facts with evaluation and certainty with caution, and present their work most persuasively.

Review of the Literature, Functional Analysis and Empirical Background to the Study
Researchers have studied Metadiscourse in different contexts and texts, e.g., company annual reports (Hyland, 1986); caused conversation (Schiffrin, 1985); science popularization (Crismore and Farnsworth, 1990); school text books (Crismore, 1989); post-graduate dissertation (Bunton, 1999); Darwin's Origins of the species (Crismore and Farnsworth, 1989); introductory course books (Hyland,1999); slogans and headlines (Fuertes_Olivera et al., 2000); undergraduate textbooks (Hyland,2000); and Metadiscourse in academic writing: a reappraisal (Hyland and Tse, 2004), but it seems there has been little research in the world of literature and this increased the researcher's interest in scrutinizing a literary work of art regarding Metadiscourse elements.
As Metadiscourse features are peculiar, some researchers have investigated them in different disciplines and languages, e.g., Finnish-English economic texts (Mauranan, 1993), a comparison of linguistic and medicine abstracts (Melander et al., 1997), Spanish-English economic texts (Valero, 1996), and medicine, economics and linguistic in English, French and Norwegian (Breivega et al., 2002).Few of these studies on Metadiscourse in different disciplines and languages are reviewed below: As an example, Hyland (1999) examined the use of Metadiscourse in two types of data, i.e. textbooks and research articles in three subject fields of Biology, Applied Linguistics and Marketing.The results suggested that the applied linguistics texts included considerably more evidential markers; the biology authors used more hedges; and marketing textbooks had fewer endophorics and evidential markers.Hyland indicated that in the biology discipline, most categories of metadiscourse had the greatest variation across both disciplines and genres.The findings also indicated that applied linguistics and marketing texts were more consistent across genres and both were different in terms of hedges and connectives.The results also showed that the important difference among the different genres was in the use of evidential and person markers in marketing, and endophorics and relation markers in applied linguistics.
Similarly, Dahl (2004) studied two kinds of Metadiscourse (locational and rhetorical meta-text) in three disciplines (Linguistics, Economics and Medicine) across three languages (English, Norwegian and French).She explained that in the economics, the frequency of the two types were higher than in the Linguistics for both Norwegian and English, while in French language there was hardly any differences within these two disciplines.Also, medicine made the least use of meta-text and medical texts had a highly structured format: Introduction_ Methodology_ Results_ discussion.She concluded that linguistics and economics in English and Norwegian had very similar patterns, and they used much more meta-text than French; all three languages displayed a uniform pattern of meta-text in the medical texts.Blagojevic (2004), has also investigated the application of Metadiscourse in academic articles written in English by English and Norwegian native speakers across three disciplines (Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy) .Blagojevic found that Psychology writers were unwilling to use the plain ways to talk about the parts of the material which followed or preceded.They also used less attitude markers, but philosophy writers made most of their comments directly.Hyland and Tse (2004) investigated the use of Metadiscourse in post-graduate dissertations in six disciplines: public administration, computer science, applies linguistics, business studies, Biology, and Electric engineering.The results of these studies showed that the non-humanities apply less Metadiscourse than the humanities and social science disciplines.Their study revealed greater application of Metadiscourse in the humanities and more inter-disciplinary balance of interactive Metadiscourse but its higher proportion in the science dissertations.Besides, the results indicated that engagement markers and boosters were almost equally distributed across disciplines, but hedges were over twice more present in the humanities and self-mentions almost four times more frequent.Transitions were more carefully used in the humanities, but emphatics were used more in the non-humanities especially in engineering.Although the use of evidential, which provides support for the writer's positions, was mostly present in the humanities, they were most applied in biology to display the importance of relating the current research to the preceding work of other authors in this field.
In a research carried on by Zarei and Mansoori (2007) the Metadiscourse patterns across Persian and English languages in computer engineering and applied linguistics were investigated.They noticed that in both English and Persian languages text coherence was emphasized over interpersonal functions of language.Moreover, the results revealed that Persian contained more presuppositions in the text, with a great amount of meaning left to be decided by the reader.
Although a general picture of the Metadiscourse was presented in the previous studies, because of the rhetorical significance and also dynamic character of Metadiscourse in various disciplines and languages, it seems necessary to scrutinize the issue further.
There is an important issue in the Metadiscourse literature, often being a source of confusion in empirical studies.It concerns whether Metadiscourse is a syntactic or functional category.There are some analysts adopting both approaches simultaneously (e.g.Crismore et al., 1993).But, most writers have a functional approach and have sought to classify the linguistic tokens, or Metadiscourse markers, based on the functions they perform in a text (e.g.Lautamati, 1978;Meyer, 1975;Williams, 1981).
"The term functional has a number of meanings in applied linguistics, but in Metadiscourse studies it refers to how language works to achieve certain communicative purposes for users" (Hyland, 2005, p.24).Therefore, it concerns if a stretch of language is directing readers to an action or response, asserting a claim, posing a question, elaborating a meaning, etc. Functional analysis, according to Hyland (2005), is a pragmatically grounded description of any text dealing with the use of language in relation to its surrounding co-text and the aim of the writer in creating a text as a whole.The emphasis is on the meaning in the context, the way language is used, not the dictionary definition of it.So, whenever we consider an item as Metadiscourse, we are to answer this question: "What is this item doing here at this point in the text?, not " What is the function of this item?"(Hyland, 2005, p. 24).
As Hyland (2005) suggests, Metadiscourse is a relative concept in that text items only function as Metadiscourse in relation to another part of the text.So, one item can be regarded as Metadiscourse in one rhetorical context, but propositional material in another, and analysts are supposed to examine each item individually to decide what function it has.The potential multifunctionality of items is illustrated in the following examples here, the italicized word in (a) below functions as Metadiscourse, while in (b) it does not: (1) (a) I want to agree about the date, then we can talk about the venue.
(b) I was waiting an hour then he told me the train had already left.
(2) (a) It's possible that he just forgot to collect it.
(b) It's possible to see the peaks of Snowdonia on a clear day.
(3) (a) I think she is crazy.First she screamed at me.Second she tore up the mail (Hyland, 2005, p. 25).
In (1a) the speaker is talking about the way he is going to organize his discussion, using then to sequence the progress of the discourse while in (1b) then tells us how events followed in time.In (2a) possible is used to suggest the speaker's estimation, proposing a likely explanation and marking this as a guess rather than a true state of affairs, and in (2b) it expresses a feasible occurrence given the right conditions, an occurrence beyond the speaker's control and not dependent on his or her assessments of likelihood.In (3a), the sequence markers are being used to list the speaker's arguments, working interpersonally to convince the hearer that someone's behavior should be seen as mad.In (3b), on the other hand, they are being used to recount how events unfolded in the world rather than present an argument.In sum, it seems impossible to have simple linguistic criteria for identifying Metadiscourse unambiguously since many items can be either propositional or metafunctional depending on their role in context (Hyland, 2005, p. 25).
What seems to be more important than all is that this multifunctionality means that we cannot consider Metadiscourse as a strictly linguistic phenomenon at all, but we should regard it as a rhetorical and pragmatic phenomenon.This is because we cannot just read off particular linguistic features as Metadiscourse, but we are supposed to recognize and realize the strategies which writers and speakers are using in creating those features at particular points in their discourse.As we regard Metadiscourse as functional, it is a social act by which people carry on a discourse about their own discourse for particular rhetorical goals.These are important issues for comprehending and identifying Metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005).

Research Questions
The aims of this study are manifold: (1) To search for and characterize the elements and patterns of Metadiscourse in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as a literary genre.
(2) To evaluate the extent to which the writer has applied and taken the Metadiscourse features into account in his masterpiece.
(3) To compare the two major groups of Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse.
In other words, the present study is going to seek answers for the following questions: (1) Which Metadiscourse features have been applied in "Alice in Wonderland"?
(2) What is the extent to which these Metadiscourse features have been applied?
(3) Is there a meaningful difference between the Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse features in this novel?
As it has already been mentioned, the story provides a vast ground for countless maneuvers on its different dimensions.This research, however, will only try to pave the way for more concentration on how so many different aspects are taken into consideration practically regarding Metadiscourse elements, concerning the pioneering theories of Ken Hyland.Nonetheless, the limit of the research obliges its confinement to only one novel, Alice in Wonderland, and analyzing all Metadiscourse features except Hedges since this Metadiscourse marker has been studied and analyzed a lot by many.

Methodology
This research has tried to apply Ken Hyland's metadiscurse theories to its use in disclosing the subtleties of the sentences of Carroll's story.The researchers have tried to pursue his notions step by step in order to shed light on the Metadiscourse concepts regarding this story.In every step, instances of the quotations in the story have been found along with the explored notions.This present uses Hyland's (Hyland, 2005) taxonomy of Metadiscourse markers as a model of analysis.Hyland (2005) divides these markers into two broad categories, each one with a set of subcategories as illustrated briefly in the following tables.

Procedure
In order to obtain proper results, Ken Hyland's (2005) categorization of Metadiscourse elements was applied to its use in clarifying the subtleties of the sentences and quotations of Carroll's fiction.The researchers have attempted to follow Hyland's notions step by step in order to shed light on the Metadiscourse concepts regarding this story.In each step, instances of the quotations and sentences in the story have been given along with the explored notions.A taxonomy of Metadiscourse is given in Table 3.3 with examples of Alice in Wonderland.

Design of the study
This research is a content analysis project.Therefore, to respond to the questions in the study, the researchers used a sampling research method.A sample, according to Sam Lander ( 2008), is a subset of the population, selected either by 'probability' or 'non-probability' methods.The samples in this study are the sentences and quotations of "Alice in Wonderland" which is a fictional story.Having analyzed these samples regarding Metadiscourse features, the researchers applied an independent T-test in order to compare the two sets of Metadiscourse markers, i.e.Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse markers.

Data Analysis
The researchers selected nine out of ten Metadiscourse markers.They were later counted carefully and analyzed in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland.'

Studying the Frequency of Interactive Metadiscourse in Alice in Wonderland
As stated before, this study seeks to discover which Metadiscourse features have been applied in "Alice in Wonderland" and to what extent they have been used?Also, the researchers intend to find out if there is a meaningful difference between Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse markers in this novel.Here, regarding the research questions asked earlier, the same procedure is carried on for the Interactional Metadiscourse markers in Alice in Wonderland.

ENGAGEMNET MARKERS 914
According to Table5, the most frequent Interactional Metadiscourse Marker in "Alice in Wonderland" is Engagement Markers and the least frequent is Attitude Markers.

Studying the Distribution Normality
In order to study the distribution normality, the researchers applied the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test.The null hypothesis in this test equals the normality of the variable distribution.If the level of test meaningfulness is less than 0.05, the null hypothesis will be rejected and we can conclude that the distribution of the given variable is not normal.
The level of test meaningfulness is 0.85; therefore, we come to this conclusion that the markers have a normal distribution (the level of meaningfulness is more than 0.05).

A Comparison of frequency means between two groups
The researchers applied an independent t-test, the null hypothesis is the equality of the frequency between two groups.
If the level of the test meaningfulness (sig.) is less than 0.05, the null hypothesis will be rejected.The frequency mean in the group Interactive Metadiscourse equals 407.75, and in the group Interactional Metadiscourse equals 579.25, and the level of meaningfulness is 0.566.Considering the level of the t-test meaningfulness which is more than 0.05, the null hypothesis is not rejected.Thus, the frequencies in Interactive/Interactional Metadiscourse groups have no meaningful differences.Here, it can be seen that the Engagement Markers are the most frequent used in the story equalling 914 items and the Attitude Markers are the least frequent markers applied equalling 187 items.

Discussion and Conclusion
Ken Hyland's model for Metadiscourse has been mainly developed for academic writing and most of the researches have been carried out on this type of writing.However, according to Ken Hyland (December 30, 2012), (in an e-mail replied to the researcher), most of the categories will be relevant to literary texts as well as academic texts and it may be that just the frequencies will be different (more attitude and fewer endophoric elements probably).
For several centuries, written language has been regarded as a primary means of communication and literature has been considered as a sample of linguistic excellence, carried out through written language.Accordingly, the explanation and teaching of the language rules was restricted to written texts (Faghih & Rahimpour, 2009)."Narrative genre of writing in general and stories in particular are well-represented in some form in the language learners' schemata, and this may be a valuable touchstone in introducing interesting, authentic reading material in a form with which the reader is familiar" (Harper, 1990, p.15).
This study examined the frequency distribution of Metadiscourse Markers in the original version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" as a fiction story.Thus, through a T-test, the hypotheses were tested to see whether there is a significant difference between the Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in this novel or not.The frequency of these markers were all also calculated and put into tables.The findings suggest that there's no meaningful difference between these two categories.However, the frequencies demonstrate that the author seems to be aware of the norms of writing.The researchers didn't have an access to any literature related to the analysis of literary genres in terms of Metadiscourse Markers.But, as far as other genres are concerned, there's evidence, for instance, Crismore and Fransworth (1990), that the type of the text has an influence on the the type of Metadiscourse used.According to Dafouz-Milne (2008), texts with a balanced number of textual and interpersonal Metadiscourse are the most persuasive and texts with a low index of Metadiscourse markers are less persuasive; and it appears that readers highly value texts that guide and show consideration toward the audience.
Studies have demonstrated that literary texts use all types of Metadiscourse items more frequently than other genres.It could be presumed that the degree of "openness" of a register determines the distribution and frequency of Metadiscourse markers.The more open a register is, the more Metadiscourse markers it employs and vice versa.
As it was mentioned earlier, the researchers applied a content analysis approach to examine the frequency distribution of Metadiscourse Markers in the original version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" as a fiction story.Secondly, the hypotheses that Lewis Carroll has applied Metadiscourse markers in his work and that he has employed them to a great amount, were tested through a T-test and the researchers intended to see whether there is a significant difference between the Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in this novel or not.
The researchers selected five categories in Interactive Metadiscourse Markers with Frame Markers divided into four subcategories, and four categories in Interactional Metadiscourse Markers.Totally, the study consisted of 9 features of Metadiscourse.First through a Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test the distribution normality was tested.Afterwards, an independent T-test was applied in order to find out if there is a meaningful difference between the two groups.
Results show that in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", the frequency mean in the group Interactive Metadiscourse equals 407.75, and in the group Interactional Metadiscourse equals 579.25, and the level of meaningfulness is 0.566.Considering the level of the T-test meaningfulness which is more than 0.05, the null hypothesis is not rejected.Thus, the frequencies in Interactive/Interactional Metadiscourse groups have no meaningful differences.However, the frequencies demonstrate that the author seems to be aware of the norms of writing.Also, the researcher concluded that literary texts apply all types of Metadiscoursal items more frequently than other genres.

Table 2 .
Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse according toHyland II (2005) This study includes a literary context (Alice in Wonderland) the sentences and quotations of which are going to be analyzed considering the Metadiscourse features.The 120-page Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.The story is about a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by strange, anthropomorphic creatures.The tale plays with logic, which gives the story lasting popularity with children as well as adults.It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre, and its narrative course, characters, structure and imagery have been enormously influential in literary genre.

Table 3 .
A Taxonomy of Metadiscourse with Instances of Alice in Wonderland

Table 4 ,
illustrates the frequency of interactive Metadiscourse markers in Alice in Wonderland.

Table 4 .
Frequency of Interactive Metadiscourse for "Alice in Wonderland"

Table 4 .
, the most frequent Interactive Metadiscourse Marker in "Alice in Wonderland" is Transition Marker, and the least frequent is Endophoric Marker.Studying the Frequency of Interactional Metadiscourse in Alice in Wonderland

Table 5 .
Frequency of Interactional Metadiscourse for "Alice in Wonderland"

Table 6
b. b.Calculated from data.

Table 7
The results of our T-test illustrate that the mean frequency of the Interactive Metadiscourse Group is 407.75, and the mean frequency of the Interactional Metadiscourse Group is 579.25.It is then concluded that the Interactional Metadiscourse Markers have been used in this novel to a greater amount, but in order to see whether this difference is meaningful or not, an independent T-test was run on the means of these two sets of Metadiscourse markers.As Table8indicates, the p value is more than 0.05, so there is no significant between the interactive and interactional Metadiscourse markers.The result is clearly seen in the following figure.The items of the Interactive Metadiscourse Markers have been represented in the separate table to have a clear picture and calculate their Percentage, Valid Percentage, and Cumulative Percentage.

Table 9 ,
the frequency, percentage, valid percentage, and cumulative percentage of the Interactive Metadiscourse Markers have been shown.It is seen that the Transition Markers have the highest frequency in this story equaling 1086 items, and the Endophoric Markers are the least frequent markers used equaling 2.Similarly the items of the Interactional Metadiscourse Markers have been put into a separate table to calculate their Percentage, Valid Percentage, and Cumulative Percentage.

Table 10
also illustrates the frequency, percentage, valid percentage, and cumulative percentage of the Interactional Metaiscourse Markers in Lewiss Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'.