Attitude Markers Research Articles

Linguistic Strategies Analysis on the Official Website of Indonesia Tourism

This study deals with Linguistic Strategy in the text on the Official Website of Indonesia Tourism (www.indonesia.travel). It is aimed to investigated the type of linguistic strategy based on functions and language features and the realization of lainguistic strategy on the Official Website of Indonesia Tourism. The study is applied descriptive qualitative. The data of this study is the text contained on the Official Website of Indonesia Tourism. There are 100 data that were analyzed based on Miles and Huberman, including condensation data, display data and conclusion drawing. This study find out that there were two types of linguistic strategy used in the official website of Indonesian tourism, namely: Informative Strategy and Persuasive Strategy. It also found that linguistic strategy was realized in Indonesian tourism websites through five Interactional Metadiscourse markers based on the theory of Hyland and Tse (2004) namely Hedges, Booster, Attitude Markers, Engagement Markers and Self-mentions.

An Analysis of Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Political Science Research Articles

The study examined the interactional metadiscourse markers used in higher and lower tiered political science research articles. The specific aspects studied were: (1) the frequencies of five categories of interactional markers; and (2) the distribution of interactional markers by rhetorical sections. The descriptive study which involved the analysis of political science research articles published in 40 SCOPUS-indexed journals (20 Quartile 1; 20 Quartiles 3 and 4) conducted using Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal metadiscourse model identified 10,903 markers. Both Q1 and Q3-Q4 political science articles have boosters and hedges as the most frequently used markers, and engagement markers as the least used marker. There are significant differences between the higher and lower tiered political science research articles in the frequencies of interactional metadiscourse markers found in rhetorical sections. The method section has the most self-mentions, particularly in articles published in Q1 journals. Writers of articles published in Q1 journals prioritise boosters, indicating confidence in emphasising certainty, but writers of articles published in Q3-Q4 journals prioritise hedges over boosters. The Q1 articles have more attitude markers in the introduction and results-discussion-conclusion sections but less in the abstract and method sections, but writers of Q3-Q4 articles use attitude markers in similar frequencies across sections. The findings suggest that the nature of reader engagement varies with rhetorical sections in research articles.

“Don’t Shop Here”: A Metadiscourse Analysis of Customer Reviews on Social Media

“Don’t Shop Here” is the title of a Facebook group that posts authentic customer reviews, written by Egyptians, on different products and services. Since these posts are a form of communication that takes place via electronic devices on the internet, it is considered a Computer-Mediated Discourse (CMD), also known as Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). From the group title, the consumers’ posts that are published in the group are mostly negative, with a live interaction and comments by the group members, who sometimes include product/service providers among them. This study focuses on consumers’ interpersonal behavior that reveals their attitudes and evaluations. This is believed to be achieved by applying Hyland’s (2005) Metadiscourse Model. The model comprises several analytical tools that include engagement markers, hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention that assist in describing the different relationships between customers and their audience, on the one hand, and customers and product/service providers, on the other hand.

The multilingual turn in pragmatics

AbstractIn the Valencian Community in Spain, the coexistence of Spanish and Catalan as co-official languages and English as a foreign language, which is learned as a third language (L3), shapes a unique multilingual setting. This study examined the extent to which multilingual learners’ use of two interpersonal pragmatic markers (PMs), i.e., hedges (e.g.,I believe) and attitude markers (e.g.,fortunately), is related across languages and whether the relationship changes over time. Participants were 313 Spanish-Catalan bilingual high school learners of L3 English. They wrote three opinion essays over one academic year in the three languages of instruction: Spanish, Catalan, and English. Quantitative results revealed a trend towards stronger correlations over time in both PMs. At Time 3, correlations were statistically significant for all language pairs in hedges and for two language pairs in attitude markers (Spanish and Catalan, Spanish and English). Qualitative analyses of the learners’ essays lend support to these results and show transfer at the phrase and discourse-level.

The Use of Metadiscourse by Saudi and British Authors: A Focus on Applied Linguistics Discipline

This study investigated the use of metadiscourse tools by Saudi and British authors in Applied Linguistics discipline. In particular, the study tried to identify the kinds of metadiscourse markers used by Saudi and English authors in ALRAs and to determine the most and least frequent metadiscourse makers. In order to achieve these goals, (10) ALRAs written by Saudi authors and (10) ALRAs written by British authors served as the corpus of the study. The research articles were selected from well-known journals and published between 2010 – 2018. Hyland's (2005) model was used to find out the distribution of metadiscourse markers in each type of corpora. The findings showed interactive metadiscourse markers are used more than the interactional metadiscourse markers. Compared with the British authors, the Saudi authors were found to use metadiscourse markers more than the British authors. The Saudi authors employed all metadiscourse sub-categories more frequently than the British authors except frame markers, evidentials, endophoric markers, and self-mentions. In addition, it was found that transitions were the highly frequent metadiscourse markers in the whole corpora, followed by hedges, evidentials, boosters, and attitude markers, respectively. On the other hand, engagement markers were the least frequent metadiscourse markers in the whole corpora. 

A Study of Xi Jinping’s Speech Discourse in the Context of Metadiscourse

Metadiscourse is an important concept in the field of discourse analysis, but related studies have been confined to various genres of written discourse. There is little research on the persuasive function of metadiscourse in speech. This paper adopts a data analysis method to collect keynote speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremonies of the 1th to 4th China International Import Expo and Xi Jinping’s New Year message from 2014 to 2022, with a total of 13 speeches as the corpus of this research. Based on the literature research method, directives, self-mentions, and attitude markers of Hyland’s Model of Metadiscourse are combined with the affective appeals of Aristotle’s rhetorical persuasion theory as an analytical framework to analyze the corpus. And the purpose of this paper is to discuss how these three types of metadiscourse achieve affective appeals in Xi Jinping’s speeches. The study finds that these three types of metadiscourse are frequently used in Xi Jinping’s speeches and have realized an important affective appeal function as well as enhanced the persuasion effect of the speech.Directives,self-mentions, andattitude markersare conducive to affective appeal, resonating with the audience, and achieving the purpose of persuasion in the speech. This paper finds ways to promote the audience’s understanding of speech from the perspective of metadiscourse rhetorical persuasion by studying the affective appeal function of metadiscourse in Xi Jinping’s speeches.

The metadiscourse of Arabic academic abstracts: A corpus-based study

Research on metadiscourse and rhetorical features in modern Arabic academic writing is scarce both in quantity and in scope. Abstracts, in particular, are a severely understudied academic register. This study aims to fill a gap in the study of academic abstracts in Arabic by providing a more comprehensive analysis of metadiscourse in Arabic academic abstracts. The data for the study includes a corpus of 400 Arabic abstracts, which have been labeled according to two variables: (a) abstract type (journal or dissertation); and (b) author gender (male, female, mixed gender). The analysis follows the theoretical framework proposed by Hyland (2019), as the data has been annotated for both textual metadiscourse (transition markers, frame markers, evidentials, endophorics and code glosses) and interpersonal metadiscourse (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers and self-mentions). Results show that Arabic academic abstracts are rich in both types of metadiscourse features. Transition and frame markers have the highest frequency in the textual domain, while boosters and self-mentions are highly frequent in the interpersonal domain. Endophoric markers and hedges are the least used types of metadiscourse in the data, but engagement markers are surprisingly more frequent than previously thought.

РЕЦИПРОКНІСТЬ ЕМОЦІЙНОЇ ЕКСПРЕСИВНОСТІ У ТРІАДІ «КОРИСТУВАЧ МЕДИЧНИХ ПОСЛУГ-РОДИНА- МЕДПРАЦІВНИК»

The paper aims to explore theoretically and empirically the reciprocity of expressed emotion (EE) in the interaction of medical service users with chronic gastrointestinal diseases, their relatives and healthcare staff. The key research question was whether the objective emotions expresses by relatives and healthcare staff coincided with subjective EE experienced by medical service users. The study applied methods of theoretical analysis, as well as measures, represented by scales and questionnaires for empirical research, including the Health-Related Quality of Life Questionnaire (EQ-5D-3L), the Level of Expressed Emotion Scale (LEE), the Family Attitude Scale (FAS), the perceived Expressed Emotion in Staff Scale (pEESS). According with the goal, the study aimed to solve the following research questions: Are there any correlations (as markers of EE reciprocity) between EE as the family's objective attitude to a diseased medical service user and the user's subjective experience of such family's and healthcare staff's attitude to him/her? Can the family attitudes towards a medical service user with chronic gastrointestinal diseases, the subjective experience of this attitude by the medical service user (perceived emotions expressed by the relatives), the user's subjective experience of the healthcare staff's EE and the user's health condition become predictors of disease-related quality of life? Are there any differences in health condition and disease-related quality of life according to the status of a family member (a partner/other relative)? The study results indicate that there were significant correlations between the perceived EE as a marker of subjective experiences of relatives' EE and objective family attitude towards medical service users. The findings also indicate correlations between family member's and healthcare staff's EE as it was perceived by medical service users. These results showed the reciprocal character of EE as a marker of a diseased individual's family environment. The results of the linear multiple regression showed that FAS as a marker of the family's attitude towards medical service users and users' health condition were significant predictors of life quality related to gastrointestinal diseases. There were significant differences between the objective family attitudes towards medical service users depending on caregivers' family status, in particular, FAS was higher in partners compared to other caregivers.

A Corpus-Based Comparative Stylometry of Both Sexes in Pakistani Editorials Amidst Stance Markers

The current comparative mixed-method study attempts to analyses two features of stance markers-attitude markers and self-mention—in the editorials of Pakistani male and female columnists to capture the similarities and differences in their writing styles called stylometry. Hyland’s (2005) interaction model, comprising attitude markers and self-mention, was applied on the corpus consisting of 30 editorials, 15of which were from each gender: male and female. Editorials from two newspapers—The Dawn and The News—were analyzed with the help of Ant Conc. Findings indicated that attitude markers were less significant in both genders’ writings, confirming unanimity among the stylometry of both genders. Self-mentions were present with a higher proportion in male editorials than female editorials, revealing the difference.

A Cross-Linguistic Study on the Reflection of Metadiscourse Markers in the Acknowledgements of the Iranian and Native English Dissertations

The acknowledgement section in a thesis or dissertation expresses gratitude for the people who have helped the author in the process of conducting the research and writing the paper. The study sought to explore the extent to which metadiscourse markers have been employed in the dissertation acknowledgements. Excluding the rhetorical moves, emotional tones and cultural backgrounds, the research has primarily contrasted dissertation acknowledgements written by Iranian EFL doctoral graduates and English native speakers at an identical level. Hyland’s metadiscourse model features and his four-tier main obligatory thanking move was applied to determine and interpret the features predominantly used in the thesis acknowledgements. A qualitative analysis of the results revealed that except for a meaningful difference in attitude markers, Iranian acknowledgements were consistent with the model and not any noticeable difference detected in using interactive metadiscourse features between Iranians and native speakers when writing their dissertation acknowledgements.

Stance of Indonesian Writers in Journal Articles

Stance refers to attitude, feelings, judgment or commitment of a speaker towards a proposition. A speaker employs certain linguistics features to express his stance including hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers. This research aims at analyzing stance of Indonesian writers in social and hard science journal articles written in English by examining the use of linguistic features employed as stance markers. The research result shows that the writers of social science articles use more stance marker compares to those of hard science articles. Indonesian writers maintain the objectivity of academic writing as there was very limited use of self-mentions in the articles. The stance markers used by Indonesian writers represent the positive, negative or neutral type of stance.

Describing the voice of online bullying: An analysis of stance and voice type in YouTube comments

In this article, I analyze the expression of stance in YouTube comments responding to a speech by Greta Thunberg addressing the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit. I use quantitative and qualitative analysis of explicit stance features (including attitude markers, boosters, hedges, self-mentions, and reader addresses) in order to characterize the voice type that commenters construe and examine how this voice type potentially functions as a tool for social influence. The analysis shows that the comments include continual emphatic and emotive attitude marking, almost exclusively evaluating Thunberg herself (e.g., her authenticity, cognitive ability, gender and youth), rather than directly evaluating her ideas about climate change. Commenters’ evaluations drew on common vocabulary, abbreviations, symbols, and in-group references, which were boosted for example through repetition, capitalization, expletives, and superlatives. As the evaluations were almost uniformly uncivil, positioning Thunberg as a figure of ridicule and hate, I argue that they constitute a recognizable bullying voice that has become common on social media polylogues, especially those concerned with news or politics. This voice type seems to function as a means of constructing a sense of collective identity and purpose, and as an overt show of group power. The ridicule is co-constructed by commenters as a mass social judgement, with the ‘we’ of the commenters consisting of ‘everyone’, albeit with terms of address more typically used for boys/men.

Metadiscourse in English instruction manuals

Instruction manuals need to explain specialized technical information to readers of the general public. Using metadiscourse effectively, i.e. engaging with readers and guiding them through the text, is therefore crucial for successful communication. An increased awareness of how these features are used in instruction manuals would therefore help technical writers write reader-friendly texts. This study investigates metadiscourse in ten instruction manuals in English using Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy. It was found that the interactive metadiscourse is predominated by frame markers and code glosses, which reflects the purpose of instruction manuals to explain clearly and efficiently how a machine works. The interactional metadiscourse reflects the twofold relationship between the writers and their readers: on the one hand, that of instructor and inexperienced users of the product and, on the other, that of manufacturer and customer. The former is reflected by the frequent usage of necessity attitude markers and boosters to reinforce instructions and precautions. The latter is reflected by the usage of politeness markers and the hedging of problems and risks. The visual presentation of the manuals, i.e. its segmentation, typographical variation, punctuation and illustrations, was also shown to express metadiscourse meanings.

The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in English Applied Linguistics Research Proposals by Vietnamese Postgraduate Students

Metadiscourse (MD) markers are of great importance in expressing the writers’ stance, and the use of MD markers can be diverse in different genres of writing. This study endeavors to scrutinize the use of MD markers (major groups: interactive markers and interactional markers) in research proposals by Vietnamese postgraduate students in English Applied Linguistics (EAL). A cohort of 20 EAL research proposals was analyzed using AntConc software and descriptive statistics. The results unravel that regarding interactive markers, transition markers are the most used in EAL research proposals while endophoric markers are the least commonly used. Concerning interactional markers, self-mentions markers are the most popular MD markers while attitude markers are the least popular ones used in EAL research proposals. It is further found out that the most common functions of MD markers used in EAL research proposals are to link ideas in texts and texts to readers and show the writer’s presence in the text. Received 1th August 2020; Revised 2nd June 2021; Accepted 20th August 2021

Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Applied Linguistics Reply Articles

A published research article is not the final product in the knowledge dissemination circle. One genre entailing negotiation of academic outcomes is reply articles which seem to carry an evaluative burden (Khosravi & Babaii, 2017) and provide the academics with an opportunity to communicate their comments and criticisms on the published research findings. Nevertheless, it seems to have been underestimated compared to other genres in academic discourse communities. Attempting to fill this void, the current study attempted to investigate the frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in 19 reply articles published in academic journals in applied linguistics from 2016 to 2021. Coding the interactional resources of Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse revealed that self-mentions were the commonest interactional metadiscourse markers followed by hedges, boosters, engagement markers and attitude markers in the reply articles. The study contributes to the existing literature by corroborating the genre-specific nature of interactional metadiscourse and has implications for the academic reading and writing course designers and material developers.

Bunction and Formation Mechanism of Discourse Marker ‘Kebushi’

This paper discussed ‘kebushi’ from three aspects : syntactic distribution, discourse function and formation mechanism. Firstly, fromthe aspect of syntactic distribution, through the statistics of the corpus, it is found that the occurrence of ‘kebushi’ is slightly higher than that of ‘kebu’, and the use of ‘kebushi’ and ‘kebu’ is higher than that of ‘kebushi ma’ and ‘lebushi me’, because ‘kebushi’ and ‘kebu’ themselves have a rhetorical tone. ‘Kebushi’ can be combined with ‘na’ to form the form of ‘na kebushi’, but it can not be combined with ‘zhe’. ‘Kebushi’ can appear in the dialogue, sentence groups or clauses. When it appears in the conversation, it can occupy the position of the beginning of the turn, but it can not be located in the position of the first turn. Secondly, from the perspective of pragmatic functions, this paper discusses the functions of ‘kebushi’ such as turn taking markers, response markers, attitude markers and topic markers. Finally, this paper investigates the formation mechanism of ‘kebushi’. ‘Kebuei’ first appeared in the Ming Dynasty as a response, and with the loss of later grammatical components, ‘kebushi’ began to be used independently in the Qing Dynasty to express the speaker

STANCE IN ADVANCED ACADEMIC WRITING BY SAUDI EFL POSTGRADUATES: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF CRITIQUE WRITING

Whether the postgraduate students in the EFL context are adequately trained to express their authorial voice in academic writing in an appropriate tone has not been clarified enough in the literature. The aim of this study is to explore the linguistic resources used by Saudi postgraduate students of Applied Linguistics to construct stance when they write critique essays. To achieve this goal, a corpus of 78000 words was built from 73 critique essays collected in five years. To analyze this corpus, LancsBox corpus analysis software was used to generate the concordances with frequencies of key words in context. The model of corpus analysis used was Hyland’s (2005) which views stance as a construct within a model of interaction in academic discourse that comprises boosters, hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions. The major findings of the study showed that the most frequently used stance markers were hedges, followed by attitude markers, then boosters, and finally self-mentions. In addition, the linguistic resources used in these strategies of stance construction by the students in this particular context need to be enhanced in order to conform with conventional standards of academic writing. To meet this ambitious requirement, the study recommends explicit instruction, training, and showcasing these textual resources as they occur in high quality discipline-specific publications.

Engaging readers across participants: A cross-interactant analysis of metadiscourse in letters of advice during the COVID-19 pandemic

Reader engagement has often been explored from a metadiscourse perspective, but little research has been conducted on the variation in engagement across participants, especially readers. Based on data from a collection of 120 Chinese letters of advice from governments and hospitals produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a cross-interactant analysis of metadiscourse is conducted in this paper, and the interactants’ impacts on reader engagement are discussed. The findings reveal that (1) both governments and hospitals utilize engagement markers, boosters, attitude markers, and frame markers more than other types of metadiscourse items; (2) differences exist in the use of metadiscourse among the issuing agencies; (3) as reader identity varies from ingroup to outgroup membership, the probability of booster use by a hospital is higher than that by a government; and (4) the likelihood of using frame, transition and attitude markers is higher for governments than for hospitals. The paper concludes by discussing different communicative styles adopted by two agencies in a crisis context.

Stance and engagement in English and Arabic research article abstracts

Research in the area of intercultural rhetoric has mainly focused on academic writing in English and other languages. However, the writing of research article abstracts in English and Arabic has yet received scarce attention. To this end, this study shows how academic writers interact with their readers in both English and Arabic, or how writers express their stance and engage with readers. Eighty abstracts of research articles in the field of social sciences (40 for each language)—published in two journals (Scopus Q4): Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences and the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Educational Studies—were retrieved for quantitative and qualitative analyses using Hyland’s (2005, 2019) framework. The findings are discussed in light of theories of metadiscourse and intercultural rhetoric. The analysis revealed that there are clear differences in the way academic writers express their stance and engage with readers in the two languages. Specifically, the findings showed that Arabic academic writers made less use of hedges and more use of boosters and attitude markers than English academic writers. In addition, self-mention as a stance feature was totally absent in the English abstracts but was located eight times in the Arabic ones. Finally, Arabic academic writers made less use of the engagement markers than English academic writers. The findings call for more cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analyses of academic writing in general, and research articles in particular.

Schematic Structure and Stance in Students’ Writing in Business Communication: A Comparative Study of Native English Speaking and Iranian Students

This study reports on two knowledge elements of stance and schematic structure in order to help novice students increase the efficacy of their writing in business communication. With this regard, Santos’ (2002) Business Letters of Negotiation Model and Hyland’s (2005b) Stance Model of Interaction were drawn upon. Sixty business emails written by native English speaking (NS) and Iranian students of Business Management Departments in universities were analyzed. Two raters explored the corpus for their moves/steps frequencies and a concordance software was used in order to explore stance markers frequencies. To investigate whether Iranian and NS writers are statistically different from each other, the findings of frequencies were submitted to one-variable Chi-square test. The results showed that NS and Iranian writers are not different from each other in their content staging while they are providing information/answers or negotiating. Running counter to moves 2 and 23, move 3 turned out to have different results; there was a significant difference between NS and Iranian writers in their request of information/action/favors. Results presented no significant difference between NS and Iranian writers in their employment of hedges and attitude markers of stance with regard to one-variable Chi-square test results. For boosters, Chi-square test detected a significant difference between the groups only in move 2. There was a significant difference, however, between NS and Iranian writers in their use of self-mention markers in moves 3 and 23. The results of this paper have both theoretical and pedagogical significance.