Digital Comments on News: A Contrastive Study of the Rhetorical Devices used in the United Kingdom, India and the United States of America

Abstract

In the course of writing, metadiscourse allows a writer to guide, direct and interact with their readers as it inherits the writer's intention, stance, thoughts, and feelings.The metadiscourse markers allow the readers to comprehend the writer's judgement and evaluation of the writer's target audience alongside the idea of the context in use.Hence, metadiscourse has emerged as one of the most popular methods for examining texts and a prevalent research topic since it was first brought to prominence in the early 1980s, continuing to its current popularity.With the rapid digital progression, nowadays, people are highly interested in digital newspapers, which are the online version of printed newspapers. The prime reason for the attraction towards these digital newspapers is that people get a scope to share their opinions in the form of comments after reading particular news. For this increasing interest of people in digital newspapers, emerging newspapers, as well as well-established and prestigious newspapers, are creating an online version of their printed newspapers.Our study focuses on digital comments (specifically, news comments), where the commenters express their views, opinions, and thoughts through their comments and by replying to the previous comments in the same thread. This doctoral dissertation aims at the exploration and comparison of metadiscourse markers on digital comments of the commenters. It upholds our endeavor of conducting a novel work in the field of language research. Moreover, it can pave the way for future language researchers as well.In the absence of a benchmark corpus for English news comments, we compiled our corpus by taking into account three popular domains (namely-sports, politics, and entertainment) and two different political ideologies (namely-left-wing and rightwing). We collected 2034 digital comments and a total of 2004 replies from 64 news articles from 12 leading English newspapers of three different countries (the United Kingdom, India, and the United States of America) belonging to three distinct continents (Europe, Asia, and America). In this work, we examine the use of metadiscourse v vi markers based on four aspects: different domains, English language proficiency, different geo-location, and different political ideologies. Based on these four aspects, this study examines the similarities and contrasts among writers (in our case, commenters), which aids in understanding the writers' usage of metadiscourse markers. In this dissertation, in the context of English digital news comments, for the first time, we present an in-depth quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of metadiscourse markers (interactional and interactive).We conclude that the commenters use metadiscourse markers differently across different domains; however, the use of metadiscourse may be affected by the commenters' location, language, and political ideologies. ResumenDurant l'escriptura, el metadiscurs permet que un escriptor guiï, dirigeixi i interactuï amb els seus lectors, ja que hereta la ...