Contrastive analysis of interactional discourse markers in English and Spanish newspaper texts
Julia Lavid |
Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores
This chapter reports on the contrastive analysis of interpersonal discourse markers (IDMs) in a sample of English and Spanish newspaper texts in three genres: news reports, editorials and letters to the editor. The sample was divided into a training dataset of eighteen (English-Spanish) comparable texts and a larger dataset of 220 texts, divided into 60 news reports, 60 editorials and 100 letters to the editor. Following the methodology of Hovy & Lavid (2010), we present a preliminary annotation scheme validated by an inter-annotation agreement study. We then present the results of annotating the larger dataset, which reveals genre-related and language-specific variation in the distribution of IDMs in these newspaper genres. We discuss and provide some possible explanations for the results obtained.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Research questions
- 3.Corpus data
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Preliminary annotation scheme
- 4.2Pilot agreement study
- 4.3Annotation of the larger set
- 5.Results
- 5.1Cross-genre comparison: News reports, editorials and letters
- 5.2Cross-linguistic comparison: English and Spanish
- 6.Summary and concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References
Bell, Allan
1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bednarek, Monika
2006 Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London & New York: Continuum.

Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan
1989 “
Styles of Stance in English: Lexical and Grammatical Marking of Evidentiality and Affect.”
Text: Iinterdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 9 (1): 93–124.


Cohen, Jacob
1960 “
A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales.”
Educational and Psychological Measurement 20 (1): 37–46.


Cunningham, Hamish, Diana Maynard, and Kalina Bontcheva
2002 “
GATE: A Framework and Graphical Development Environment for Robust NLP Tools and Applications.”
Proceedings of the 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’02). Philadelphia.

Hovy, Eduard, and Julia Lavid
2010 “
Towards a Science of Corpus Annotation: A New Methodological Challenge for Corpus Linguistics.”
International Journal of Translation 22 (1): 13–36.

Hyland, Ken
2005 “
Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse.”
Discourse Studies 7 (2): 173–192.


Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse
2004 “
Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal.”
Applied Linguistics 25 (2): 156–177.


Hynds, Ernest C.
1984 “
Editorials, Opinion Pages Still have Vital Roles in Most Newspapers.”
Journalism Quarterly 61: 624–639.


Lavid, Julia
2012 “
Corpus Analysis and Annotation in CONTRANOT: Linguistic and Methodological Challenges.” In
Encoding the Past, Decoding the Future: Corpora in the 21st Century, ed. by
Isabel Moskowich, and
Begoña Crespo, 205–220. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Lavid, Julia
2016 “
Discourse Annotation in the MULTINOT Corpus: Issues and Challenges.” Paper presented at the PACOR 2016 Conference (
Parallel Corpora: Creation and Applications International Symposium), 1–3
December2016, University of Santiago de Compostela.
Lavid, Julia, Jorge Arús, Bernard DeClerck, and Veronique Hoste
2015 “
Creation of a High-Quality, Register-Diversified Parallel Corpus for Linguistic and Computational Investigations.” In
Current Work in Corpus Linguistics: Working with Traditionally Conceived Corpora and Beyond: Selected Papers from the 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2015). Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 198 (24): 249–256.

Lavid, Julia, Jorge Arús, and Lara Moratón
2009 “
Comparison and Translation: Towards a Combined Methodology for Contrastive Corpus Studies.”
International Journal of English Studies: Recent and Applied Corpus-Based Studies. Special Issue 1: 159–173.

Lavid, Julia, Jorge Arús, and Lara Moratón
Lavid, Julia, and Lara Moratón
2015 “
Intersubjective Positioning and Thematisation in English and Spanish: A Contrastive Analysis of Letters to the Editor.”
Nordic Journal of English Studies 14 (1): 289–319.

Lavid, Julia, and Lara Moratón
2016 “
Generic Structures, Rhetorical Relations and Thematic Patterns in English and Spanish Journalistic Texts: A Comparative Study.” Paper presented at the
26th ESFLW, July 2016. University of Salzburg.

Moratón, Lara, Julia Lavid, and Jorge Arús
2012 “
Themes, Hyperthemes and Generic Structure in English and Spanish newspaper genres.” Paper presented at the
11th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English, September 2012. Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.

Moratón, Lara
2015 Thematic Patterning in English and Spanish: Contrastive Annotation of a Bilingual Newspaper Corpus for Linguistic and Computational Applications. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Available at:
[URL].
Pak, Chin-Sook, and Rebeca Acevedo
2005 “
Spanish Language Newspaper Editorials from Mexico, Spain and the U.S.” In
Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric, ed. by
Ulla Connor,
Ed Nagelhout, and
William V. Rozycki, 123–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Swales, John
1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Viera, Anthony J., and Joanne M. Garrett
2005 “
Understanding Interobserver Agreement: The Kappa Statistic.”
Family Medicine 37 (5): 360–363.

Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Al-Subhi, Aisha Saadi
2023.
Interactional meta-discourse and phraseology in newspaper editorials during the Russia-Ukraine War.
Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies 13:3
► pp. e202331 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.