The pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse - commentary on the ongoing discourse - is beginning to take its rightful place among the major topics of discourse studies. This book makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of metadiscourse, corpus-based methods of studying such phenomena, and our knowledge of metadiscourse use in written English. After comprehensively reviewing previous research, it introduces a more rigorous and empirical approach to metadiscourse studies. Adel presents a new model of metadiscourse based on Jakobson's functions of language, and other conceptual tools,...