Comparing metadiscourse markers employed in English and Persian online headlines

2017 IJRSLL – Volume 6 Issue 4

Author/s:

Yazdani, Akram
English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran (divinedear662@yahoo.com)

Salehi, Hadi*
English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran (Hadisalehi1358@yahoo.com)

Abstract:

This study aimed to investigate the differences in the use of metadiscourse markers between Persian and English online headlines about the first two months of the year 2015. To this end, the corpora in the present study comprise a total of 100 Persian and English online headlines (each 50 headlines) were chosen randomly from English and Persian newscasts such as VOA, CNN, Bistosi (20:30), and Bashgahkhabarnegaran. The specific research area of interest was whether online Persian and English headlines made a similar field-specific use of metadiscourse markers. The corpora were recorded and divided in two groups of Persian online headlines and English online headlines. The corpora also consisted of different fields, politics, economic, sport, entertainment, cultural, social, and world news. According to Hyland’s (2005) model, interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers were identified in online headlines. The analysis revealed that according to descriptive statistics Persian fields made more use of the metadiscourse markers than English fields. The findings of this research would help to keep journalism students aware of this aspect of metadiscourse.

Keywords: metadiscourse; English headlines; Persian headlines; field-specific

PDF

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrsll.2016.1554

*Corresponding Author