Chapter published in:
The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 75–108

Contrastive analysis of interactional discourse markers in English and Spanish newspaper texts

| Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores
| Universidad Complutense, Spain

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.

Keywords: interactional discourse markers, stance, engagement, English, Spanish, newspaper genres, corpus annotation
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
Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.04lav
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

López, Julia Lavid
2019.  In Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 90], ► pp. 159 ff. Crossref logo

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