Abstract

Metadiscourse markers (MMs) are lexical resources that writers use to organize their discourse and express their stance about the content or the reader. Metadiscourse analysis of Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials (PENE) has been conducted. The corpus of this study has contained 1000 editorials taken from four renowned Pakistani newspapers: Dawn News (DN), The Frontier (TF), The Express Tribune (TET) and The News (TN). The distribution of 250 editorials from each newspaper has been retrieved from online sources. The frequencies of metadiscourse features (MFs) have been counted and compared, and further studied metadiscourse features (MFs) functionally on the basis of propositional and non-propositional contents. A comprehensive model on Interpersonal metadiscourse has been proposed and it has been categorized into interactive and interactional markers. A comprehensive scheme of metadiscourse markers (MMs) has been proposed for the analysis of the present study. The findings revealed that all corpora used more interactive than interactional markers. In this regard, the sub-categories of interactive metadiscourse such as sequencing markers and transition markers have been frequently observed in the corpus of The Frontier (TF) as compared to other said corpora. The sub-categories of interactional metadiscourse such as engagement, and hedges have been frequently seen in the corpus of The Frontier (TF) as compared to other said corpora. In conclusion, this study has claimed that The Frontier (TF) is more reader-friendly because of the excessive use of interactive metadiscourse.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.