Metadiscourse in helping strategies: a corpus-based analysis of Chinese online psychological counseling responses

Introduction Text-based online psychological counseling lacks nonverbal cues, relying primarily on language to sustain the therapeutic alliance and facilitate clients’ self-healing. This communicative constraint makes it important to investigate how counselors use linguistic resources, especially metadiscourse, to achieve these aims. Methods To this end, using a corpus-based approach built upon the PsyQA dataset, the present research maps the metadiscourse distributions within six helping strategies in Chinese online counseling responses and further examines how metadiscourse supports exploration, insight, and action. Results and discussion This research reveals that each strategy exhibits a characteristic metadiscourse distribution, tailored to its specific discursive function. This consistency suggests that linguistic choices are shaped in a principled manner by the function each strategy is intended to serve. Metadiscourse can therefore be understood as a set of linguistic resources through which counselors fulfill these functions. The implications drawn from these findings are offered as a preliminary reference for applying metadiscourse to counselor training and for informing the design of AI counseling systems aimed at generating contextually appropriate responses.