ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author takes up dialogicity by discussing what he have found in the corpus regarding the interactive use of metadiscursive nouns in the two most frequent patterns: the determiner + N and N + post-nominal clause pattern. In the existing quantitative literature on social stratification and mobility, a complexity is routinely ignored when relationships between generations are described. Although the patterning of cohesive ties concerns the argumentation and intelligibility of texts, it is also indicative of “part of the larger processes of argument and alliances within scientific communities”, reflecting the assumptions that writers make about readers and the discourse community. In sum, metadiscursive nouns are used by writers, as “rhetorical strategies that express a theory of experience in conventionally coherent ways”. Thus metadiscursive nouns afford authors rhetorical chances to “demonstrate control of their texts as disciplinary authorities”.
