Adjunctive English General Extenders in Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

General extenders (GEs) perform different functions in discourse and have been studied diversely, based on scholars’ foci. Viewed as universal vague informal spoken discourse markers in some studies, this study argues that the elements are deliberate vague discourse-pragmatic elements, in newspaper editorials of nine countries with different language situations of the English Language. Focusing on an aspect of the English GEs, the adjunctive GEs, and using the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches of the corpus linguistics methodologies, the study purposively sampled five-month online newspaper editorials from the nine sampled countries to compare native and non-native speakers’ use of the English GEs. The corpus was subjected to AntConc® Concordance Tool to identify and examine, the occurrence of the linguistic items in the newspaper editorials as well as their similarities, variations and their functions in the editorials. The study provided statistical evidence in probing into the functions the discourse elements perform in the discourse of English users as well as determine the proficiency of non-native users of the elements and the impact of language contact on language use.