A Cross-linguistic Study of Metadiscourse in English and Urdu Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

Metadiscourse markers are linguistic expressions which help the writers to organize their
discourses. The original impetus for the research study came from the need to explore similarities
and differences among the use and distribution of metadiscourse markers between two different
languages, English and Urdu, within a single genre. To this end, the study as cross-linguistic
research scrutinized a corpus of 100 newspaper editorials (50 taken from English newspapers and
50 from Urdu newspapers) written in Pakistan. Editorials were culled electronically from 5 English
newspaper websites and 5 Urdu newspaper websites. To mitigate the diachronic effects on the
selected sample, only editorials published in the first four months of 2020 (January, February,
March, and April) were included in the corpora. Based on the model of metadiscourse markers
given by Hyland (2005), both interactive and interactional categories of the model were analyzed.
Frequencies of metadiscourse markers in both English and Urdu were counted through AntConc
3.5.7. They were compared and contrasted quantitatively and manually. The results disclosed that
there were worth-pointing differences between the two groups. Two different languages showed
variations among different subcategories of interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources.
On the whole, findings suggested that the use of interactional metadiscourse was a predominant
category and attitude marker was a predominant feature in both the groups. Analysis of differences
that meta-discourse tools can encounter in the process of translating from English to Urdu or even
other languages maybe another and very interesting field of inquiry.