Exploring Positive Discourse Analysis in Selected Harvard Commencement Speeches: An Interactional Metadiscourse Analysis

Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) shifts the focus of Critical Discourse Analysis from detecting injustices to finding and endorsing more positive alternatives. Commencement speeches are practical examples of PDA. Speakers employ metadiscourse markers in their speeches to inspire the audience in an attempt to modify their attitudes, sentiments and actions. The role of metadiscourse markes is more crucial in spoken genre as managing spoken interaction is greater in ‘real time’ in front of audience. The current study has examined the metadiscourse markers in six Harvard commencement speeches that offer inspiring messages of justice, courage, resilience, empathy as identified by The Harvard Gazette. The study adapted Hyland's (2005) classification model of interpersonal metadiscourse to interactive and interactional with a focus on the interactional ones because of their role in engaging the audience and signaling a speaker’s attitude. The results of the study show that the speakers have successfully achieved interpersonal relations with their audience through the use of all interactional metadiscourse resources with the attitude and engagement markers ranking the highest. Moreover, the analysis reveals that, despite the speakers' different background, gender, and specialization, they talk about similar topics. These factors did not affect the intensity of interactional metadiscourse indicators in the six speeches. This study provides insight into linguists’ interested in PDA and discourses that promote the change audience wants to see. The results can also be of benefit to teachers, students, and public speakers with understandings about the structure of spoken texts and the interactional metadiscourse features that help developing the speaker-audience rapport and preserving the speaker's personage.