Approaching the audience: engagement markers in Longinus’ On the Sublime

Abstract

Abstract Metadiscourse is a significant method in revealing audience awareness, but related studies have been confined to linguistic markers and current writing analyses. This essay aims to enrich metadiscourse engagement in particular with certain rhetorical figures and to investigate audience awareness in a highly acclaimed Roman-era Greek classic: Longinus’ On the Sublime. Drawing from a refined framework of engagement, we find explicit evidence of audience awareness as manifested in the author’s use of engagement markers. We have sorted these markers into four types, including reader mentions (apostrophe and pronouns), directives (modal verbs and imperatives), questions (erotema and rogatio), and appeals to shared knowledge (emphasizers and comment clauses). We suggest that the frequent use of these engagement markers, in particular reader mentions, could be taken as evidence of the author’s strong audience awareness and the cueing effect in facilitating perception. This integration of rhetorical figures into the metadiscourse engagement markers contributes to the audience awareness analysis in a more explicit and comprehensive way.