Abstract:

This paper attempts to investigate the philosophy of using metadiscourse markers in four different editorial texts of two Nigerian newspapers, and reports both their qualitative and quantitative distributions and extent of contribution to rendering the writers’ communicative intentions to the readers. Recent research findings indicate that Metadiscourse is central to pragmatic construal which provides writers with appropriate means constructing adequate co-texts and assumptions to influence readers’ understandings of both the text and their attitude in the text content. Accordingly, this paper assumes that metadiscourse markers linguistically encode clue on how text-producers try to instruct and direct their audience (readers) so that both the discourse and the writer’s stance be clearly understood by the reading community.

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