Ten years ago, I remarked on the surprisingly small proportion of metadiscourse studies that investigated spoken discourse compared to the total amount of metadiscourse research (Mauranen 2012). This is still true, even though much more research has been devoted to spoken discourses since then. The proportional gap remains enormous. If we look for studies addressing not only speaking in general, but speaking in dialogic interaction, the result is hardly visible to the naked eye.
The ultimate reason for studying metadiscourse has not changed. It is the intrinsic fascination of this fundamental characteristic of human language: the ability to reflect on itself. This inbuilt capacity in our languages is an indication of a more general capacity of the human mind to monitor its own operations, that is, metacognition. We can think about our own thinking, and we can talk about our own talking. Language is nevertheless not only an instrument of cogitation, but of communication. Dialogic speech is where cognition meets interaction; metadiscourse is one of the resources that language has for increasing the transparency of our intended meanings and communicative intentions to our interlocutors. It builds on our theory of mind, which makes assumptions about what our interlocutors or audiences know and think, and thereby helps us design our talk for our recipients accordingly. Importantly, metadiscourse is a discourse phenomenon, therefore not reducible to individual words or phrases, and even when individual metadiscoursal expressions coincide with a word or phrase, it is their status in the discourse that matters. Therefore, counting ‘metadiscourse markers’, useful as it may be for comparisons, generally makes for conservative rather than innovative research.
Speech is foundational to language, unquestionably its most ubiquitous and constant mode of use, and can with a high degree of confidence be said to be its original mode (possibly vying for first place with sign language); spoken interaction is what language is fundamentally about. Passing it over in studies of metadiscourse is a major omission.
Two things, then, motivate writing a book on metadiscourse in spoken interaction: metadiscourse research has all but ignored spoken interaction, and spoken interaction research has all but ignored metadiscourse.
What reason do we have, then, for assuming that investigating dialogic speech might bring new understanding to the study of metadiscourse? Most studies comparing written and spoken metadiscourse, or only studying the latter, have found no major differences. The early studies that compared metadiscourse in speech and writing discovered only minor differences (Luukka 1995;Ädel 2010), and although some more recent studies have begun to challenge their similarity somewhat more (Lee& Subtirelu 2015;Liu 2021), they have not come up with radical departures either. Even without direct comparison, studies of spoken academic monologues like lectures or presentations have applied analytical models built on written texts and found largely similar metadiscourse (e.g.,Rowley-Jolivet& Carter-Thomas 2005;Webber 2005;Pérez-Llantada 2006; Fernández Polo 2018), with some scholars observing more colloquial expressions (Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995;Zareva 2011). More recently, these more traditional academic speech genres have received an addition from a short presentation type, the three-minute pitch, or three-minute thesis presentation (3MT), where doctoral students present their research in competitive settings. The 3MT has become a popular topic for metadiscourse research (Zou& Hyland 2020; Hyland& Zou 2022;Qiu& Jiang 2021;Liu 2021) and other kinds of discourse studies. Again, the studies have appliedHyland’s (2005) writi
