Digesting Psychology: Metadiscourse as a Recontextualising Tool in the Digital Communication of Disciplinary Research

Abstract

Metadiscourse was initially conceived as a tool to explore mainly academic, monologic, written texts. When applied to the study of digital discourse, metadiscourse may reveal itself as a rather frustrating exploratory framework, firstly because of the problematised interaction between writer and reader in an online context where audiences are not easily identifiable and, secondly, because of the multimodal character of digital texts. In the present study, the role played by interactive metadiscoursal resources in online communication has been explored. For such purposes, the focus has been placed on a corpus of digital research digests published on the website of the British Psychological Society, the most important representative body of the profession in the United Kingdom. The study revolves around the function of interactive metadiscourse as a recontextualising tool to facilitate the understanding of complex disciplinary knowledge for potentially less expert readers. Several interactive resources (code glosses, evidentials, transition markers, and frame markers) are identified, which strategically contribute to the mediation of specialised information and which also take advantage of the affordances offered by digital platforms.