Language and Gender in Pakistani Newspaper: Use of Interactional Metadiscoursal Markers in Male and Female Bloggers

Abstract

In newspapers, opinionated blogs written by male and female writers reflect subtle gender differences. This research aimed to study these gender differences through the lens of Hyland's (2005) framework of interactional metadiscoursal markers used by male and female bloggers in their writings. For this study, two medium-sized gendered corpora have been developed containing 1,23,847 words, and the data was retrieved from the Dawn newspaper from January 2020 to December 2020. To analyze this data interactional metadiscoursal markers were identified, and the frequency pattern of such instances had been noted in the blogs through corpus analysis. The free software tool AntConc was used to evaluate the frequencies of the selected expressions in male and female corpora. The findings indicated that female bloggers were more inclined towards using hedges, personal pronouns, boosters interactional metadiscoursal markers in their language as compared to male bloggers.