stance markers

This contrastive study was conducted to contrastively analyze English and Farsi newspaper opinion columns in terms of the frequency of different types of stance markers.60 newspaper opinion columns (30 written in English and 30 written in Farsi) from 10 wide spread newspapers published in the United States and Iran in 2015 were analyzed. Hyland’s (2005) model of stance markers (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention) was used as the framework of analysis.The findings revealed that hedges and self-mentions used by English columnists were considerably more frequent than those employed by the Farsi columnists. In contrast, Farsi columnists used large number of boosters and attitude markers. Although, attitude markers were in the last position of sub-categories of stance markers in both corpora.Generally, it could be concluded that the similarities and differences among columnists could be related to the cultural and linguistic preferences of the writers in languages. This study could be beneficial for EFL students and teachers in understanding intercultural linguistic problems in language use, and could be used to lead to creative reading and writing in journalism and ESP courses.

This comparative corpus-based study was launched to analyze the use of intensifiers and indefinite pronouns indicating generality in two disciplines of applied linguistics (AL) and power system engineering (PSE). Accordingly, four corpora were considered in this study: two corpora representing English articles written by L1-English writers in applied linguistics (L1-English AL corpus) and power system engineering (L1-English PSE corpus), and two other corpora (L1-Persian AL corpus and L1-Persian PSE corpus) belonging to English articles written by L1-Persian writers in the same two disciplines. The findings revealed that the indefinite pronouns were used more frequently than intensifiers in all corpora; on the other hand, the use of qualified-generalization markers in the two L1-Persian corpora exceeded that in the L1-English corpora. As for disciplinary differences, the AL conclusions contained more generalization and qualified-generalization stance markers, as compared to their PSE counterparts. The study concludes with some implications regarding the representation of authorial voice.