Attitude Markers as Metadiscourse in Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials: A Corpus-Based Study

Metadiscourse in Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The primary goal of this study is to investigate the writers‘ choice of attitude markers to explore how these preferred markers show the writers‘ stances and styles of communication to their readers. The secondary goal is to study how attitude markers serve their functions in Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials. For the study, a total number of 1000 of editorials, 250 editorials from each of the four major Pakistani English Newspapers; i) Dawn News, ii) The News, iii) The Express Tribune and iv) The Frontier, were collected. Textinspector.com and Hyland‘s taxonomy of attitude markers (2005a) were used as tools to identify the attitude markers in the corpus data. This finding of the study showed that the Frontier‘s editorialists used attitude markers more frequently than the other three newspapers‘ editorialists. Dawn News editorialists were the second frequent users. In conclusion, the editorialists of The Frontier and Dawn News used a large number of attitude markers to show their stances and tocommunicate their opinions.