CORPUS-DESCRIPTION OF ADDITIVE DISCOURSE MARKERS IN ENGLISH OPINION ARTICLES
ASEM AYED AL- KHAWALDEH *
School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia
NORSIMAH MAT AWAL
School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia
INTAN SAFINAZ ZAINUDIN
School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The present paper is a corpus-based study of the use of the additive discourse markers in one newspaper genre, namely, opinion articles. It intends to provide a description of the additive markers in terms of identifying items that indicate the additive function in text, showing the most commonly used ones, and describing their positions, forms, and functions. To this end, the study compiled a small-scale corpus of 100 articles from four leading English newspapers. Both qualitative as well as quantitative methods of research were employed to characterize additive discourse markers. The study identified a set of 27 different items that indicate the additive function, which come from various grammatical forms. In terms of position, they were mostly found to occur initially. Additive discourse markers were found in the study to serve a wide range of functions. Only four additive markers (and, also, or, too) displayed a high frequency in comparison with other additive markers that showed a low frequency.
Keywords: Additive markers, functions, corpus, journalistic discourse, opinion articles