Contrastive analysis of interactional discourse markers in English and Spanish newspaper texts

Abstract

This chapter reports on the contrastive analysis of interpersonal discourse markers (IDMs) in a sample of English and Spanish newspaper texts in three genres: news reports, editorials and letters to the editor. The sample was divided into a training dataset of eighteen (English-Spanish) comparable texts and a larger dataset of 220 texts, divided into 60 news reports, 60 editorials and 100 letters to the editor. Following the methodology of Hovy & Lavid (2010), we present a preliminary annotation scheme validated by an inter-annotation agreement study. We then present the results of annotating the larger dataset, which reveals genre-related and language-specific variation in the distribution of IDMs in these newspaper genres. We discuss and provide some possible explanations for the results obtained.

Interactional meta-discourse and phraseology in newspaper editorials during the Russia-Ukraine War

“…The fact that there was significantly higher stance markers than engagement markers in the corpus can be attributed to the journalistic nature of the editorials, which does not require real engagement with readers. This predominance of stance markers over engagement markers in both the USA and the UAE editorials has been reported by previous research (Lavid & Moratón, 2018).…”

“…Other studies of meta-discourse addressed media discourse and many registers such as editorials, opinion columns, and advertisements have been investigated (Al-Subhi, 2021, 2022Dafouz-Milne, 2008;Fu & Hyland, 2014;Le, 2004). More recent studies have looked at interactional meta-discourse and its specific features such as Khanbutayeva (2019), andLavid andMoratón (2018). Lavid and Moratón (2018) conducted a contrastive analysis of international meta-discourse markers in a sample of English and Spanish newspaper texts in three genres: news reports, editorials, and letters to the editor.…”

“…More recent studies have looked at interactional meta-discourse and its specific features such as Khanbutayeva (2019), andLavid andMoratón (2018). Lavid and Moratón (2018) conducted a contrastive analysis of international meta-discourse markers in a sample of English and Spanish newspaper texts in three genres: news reports, editorials, and letters to the editor. Results reported genre-related and language-specific variation in the distribution of these markers in newspaper genres.…”