represents the sum total of all kinds of such linguistic tokens or "signposts" (Stubbs 65). It is this meaning conveyed by the term metadiscourse that rhetoricians and composition theorists have largely been preoccupied with, even though the major- ity of them have not explicitly distinguished it from the first, more abstract meaning. It is also this concrete meaning on which my paper is going to be centered. To avoid unnecessary confusion resulting from the potentially polysomic term metadiscourse, 5 I dub various kinds of linguistic tokens that realize the second sense of metadiscourse: metadiscourse markers.