The Study of Discourse Markers in the Corpus of Iranian vs. American Newspaper

Discourse markers, as words or phrases, play a significant role in promoting coherent segments of discourse. They facilitate text interpretation and were key attributes in linking sentences, rendering the text coherent. This corpus-based research work was conducted to identify and compare the categories and functions of discourse markers (DMs) in the corpora of the American vs. Iranian newspaper. To do so, a corpus of ۳۰ editorial articles was extracted from New York Times and ۳۰ editorials from Iran Daily. The framework proposed by Fraser (۱۹۹۹) was employed to classify the detected categories of discourse markers (DMs) in three functions including contrastive, elaborative, and inferential. The obtained results from the descriptive statistics and Chi-Square test revealed that the American newspaper with total number of ۱۶۸ DMs was found to be superior to Iranian newspaper with total frequency of ۹۸ in terms of occurrence of DMs. More specifically, the findings indicated that the frequency of contrastive DM in the American newspaper was higher than the occurrence of this DM in the Iranian newspaper. Further, the frequency of both elaborative and inferential DMs in the New York Times editorials were considerably higher compared to the editorials extracted from Iran Daily newspaper.

کلیدواژه ها:

Discourse Markers ، Newspaper ، Editorials ، American ، Iranian