Browsing by Author "Biri, Ylva"

The purpose of this study is to analyse the use of metadiscourse in English speaking opinion writing on blogs, news sites and the websites of newspapers. Metadiscourse is a theoretical framework for describing linguistic constructions used to structure or comment on the discourse of a text. How metadiscourse is used depends on the genre and the audience of the text. Previous research, much of which has been qualitative, has shown that metadiscourse is used in opinion writing partly to make the author’s viewpoint more organised and understandable, partly to appeal to the audience in a more direct manner. The aim of this study is to describe how different types of metadiscourse correlate with each other, that is, which types of metadiscourse often occur in the same text. The method used is Multi-Dimensional Analysis, a corpus-driven quantitative method based on Factor Analysis. The data used is a collection of blogposts and opinion articles; the corpus of 285,000 words has been annotated with 13 metadiscourse marker categories. The Multi-dimensional analysis yields four statistically significant factors that describe the rhetorical strategies used to acknowledge the elements in the text and the presence of the author and the reader. The four factors are named according to their functions as (1) Writer-oriented text, (2) Solidarity, (3) Reader-oriented text, and (4) Intertextuality. The analysis compares blogs, news sites and the websites of newspapers from the perspective of genre analysis. The results show a range of variation between writers of the same genre, but in general opinion writing from the websites of newspapers is low on metadiscourse and it is used mainly to refer to cited sources. Meanwhile, news sites tend to refer to the reader through the pronoun “you” or the pronoun “we”, which in context can be understood to include the reader. Bloggers refer more often to themselves than to their readers and rarely use the inclusive “we”. The genres blogs and news sites also contain the least explicit references to sources. This study is an example of how metadiscourse can be analysed using a Multi-dimensional method. Even a study based on a smaller dataset can yield information that can be used to develop the theoretical framework of metadiscourse.