Persuasion and Interaction: The Rhetorical Use of Metadiscourse in Chomsky’s Linguistic Discourse

The present study provides quantitative and qualitative an account of the rhetorical use of metadiscourse markers in Chomsky’s On Nature and Language, claiming that interaction is an essential component of persuasion in social fields in general and in linguistic discourse in particular. Persuasion, therefore, relies on effective argument and writer-reader interaction as writers are uncertain when dealing with human subjects and data, on one hand, and unable to draw on empirical demonstration or trusted quantitative methods (Hyland, 2000). As a result, writers use language to engage their readers by positioning, persuading and including them as discourse participants (Hyland, 2019). Chomsky’s linguistic discourse received several studies, however, writer-reader interaction as an integral component of the construction and attainment of ethos was marginalized and overlooked. Accordingly, the study hypothesizes that metadiscourse plays an essential role in Chomsky’s persuasive discourse. Moreover, the study addresses the question of how metadiscourse is deployed to engage and persuade the reader, on one hand, and to create credibility persona, on the other hand. The study identified 4,724 instances of metadiscourse in a corpus of 38,183 words. This is a frequency of one every 8 words. It also shows that instances of interactional metadiscourse are significantly greater than interactive ones, and the most frequent categories are engagement markers (35.9), hedges (27.1), transitions (18.7) and boosters (16.1).