• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 2021

The study aims to explore the use of metadiscourse in the Bank Negara Malaysia Governor's speeches based on Hyland's Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse. The corpus data consist of 343 speech texts, which were extracted from the Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MacFE), amounting to 688,778 tokens. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis the study investigates (1) the overall use of metadiscourse in the Bank Negara Governor's speech texts and (2) the functions of the most prominent metadiscourse resources used and their functions in the speech texts. The findings reveal that the Governor's speech texts to be interactional rather than interactive, revealing a rich distribution of interactional metadiscourse resources, namely engagement markers, self-mention, hedges, boosters and attitude markers throughout the texts. The interactional metadiscourse resources function to establish speaker-audience engagement and alignment of views, as well as to express degree of uncertainty and certainty and attitudes. The study concludes that the speech texts are not merely informational or propositional, but rather interpersonal.