Design a comprehensive research protocol and annotation schema to support a cross‑linguistic, multimodal study of metadiscourse and argumentation in doctoral dissertations. Specify corpus sampling and stratification (languages, disciplines, formats), data collection and preprocessing (file formats, OCR, audio/video), multimodal annotation tiers (textual, typographic, visual, audio prosody, figures), operationalized taxonomies for metadiscourse and argumentative moves with examples, annotation guidelines and training materials, tools/workflows (e.g., ELAN, WebAnno, version control), pilot testing, inter‑annotator agreement procedures and metrics, ethical and copyright considerations, data management and reproducibility plan, and an implementation timeline with required resources and evaluation criteria.