Discourse Functions of Kama in Arabic Journalistic Discourse from the Perspective of Rhetorical Structure Theory

Asem Ayed Al-Khawaldeh

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.3p.206

Abstract

The study aims at examining the functions of the discourse marker Kama in the Arabic journalistic discourse in the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson (1987). To this end, the study compiled a small-scale corpus of journalistic discourse taken from two prominent Arabic news websites: Aljazeera.net and Alarabia.net. The corpus covers three distinct sub-genres of journalistic discourse: opinion articles, news reports, and sport reports. The journalistic discourse is chosen on the basis that it is considered as the best representative of the contemporary written Arabic and it receives a wide readership in the Arabic-speaking countries. The motivation for the study is that although it is frequently used in the written form of Arabic (particularly in the language of Arabic media), the discourse marker kama is largely neglected and very few has been said about it in the present literature on Arabic discourse markers. The current findings show that kama is found to achieve 290 occurrences in the corpus under investigation. This obviously indicates that kama is commonly used in the language of Arabic journalistic discourse, which calls for paying attention to its usage in such a type of discourse. In the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson (1987), kama was found to serve four common functions: elaboration (around 50 %), similarity (around 19 %), evidence (16 %), and exemplification (13 %). Two functions of kama (similarity and exemplification) are listed in RST while the other two are incorporated.

Highlights

Discourse markers (DMs ) have been the focus of a large number of studies, gaining their importance from the 1970s onwards (Halliday and Hasan 1976, Schiffrin 1987, Blakemore 1987, Fraser 1999, Aijmer 2002)
Based on the above discussion, the present study aims to examine and describe the functions of the DM kama and their frequency in the Arabic journalistic discourse from modern perspectives pertaining to the study of DMs, based on corpus-based analysis
The findings report that the total frequency of kama reached 290 occurrences, which indicates that it is one of the common DMs in the language of journalistic discourse

Summary

Introduction

Discourse markers (DMs ) have been the focus of a large number of studies, gaining their importance from the 1970s onwards (Halliday and Hasan 1976, Schiffrin 1987, Blakemore 1987, Fraser 1999, Aijmer 2002). Though the existence of various competing terms in the literature, the term “discourse markers” has been reported as the most common one of the suggested terms in the literature (Schourup 1999, Aijmer, 2002, Muller 2005). This is because the term “discourse markers” has “a narrower range of reference and has been subject to more precise attempts at definition” (Schourup 1999:230).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion