A Critical Discourse Analysis of Stance and Engagement Markers in English and Arabic Newspaper Opinion Articles in 2016

Abstract

The present study investigates the use of stance and engagement markers in English and Arabic newspaper opinion articles. This study is based on the assumption that written texts of any kind represent some kind of interaction between writers and their potential readers. Interaction between the text producers and text receivers is achieved by the employment of stance and engagement markers. These markers are considered as a main factor in constructing successful arguments for these persuasive texts (newspaper opinion articles). They are the main tools in conveying the writers' attitudes about what is being written and guiding the readers throughout the texts.

The main objectives of this study are to identify stance and engagement markers in both English and Arabic opinion articles and to contrast their use bothqualitatively and quantitatively. To this effect, a total of twenty opinion articles (ten English and ten Arabic) are analyzed adopting the analytical model of Hyland.

The results demonstrate that writers of both English and Arab opinion articlesemploy stance and engagement markers in their persuasive writing. Quantitatively speaking, the results show that the total tokens of these markers in the English datum are (210) and (211) in the Arabic datum. This indicates that these resources are used equally across the two sets of corpora. However, frequency variation is noticed in the employment of the sub-categories of stance and engagement markers across them.