A Contrastive Study of Code Glosses and Logical Markers in International and Iranian Newspaper's opinion columns

This study aimed to identify how logical markers and code glosses are distributed according to cross-cultural or cross-linguistic preferences and explore the role that they play in the construction and attainment of persuasion. For this reason, ۲۴۰ opinion columns of three Persian newspapers (IRAN, Hamshahri and Ettelaat) and two English ones (NewYork Times and Independent) were selected. Then the logical markers and code glosses were highlighted in the texts and classified based on the Dafouz-Milne' (۲۰۰۸) taxonomy of meta-discourse markers. Findings revealed that both logical markers and code glosses are present in English and Persian newspapers' opinion columns, but there are variations as to their distribution. In addition, two groups of informants have been used in order to discover how these markers operate as a persuasive mechanism in English and Persian texts. The most persuasive texts for the Iranian informants were demonstrated to be those with a high number of these markers and for the English informants; they turned out to be texts with a balanced number of these markers. Regarding the persuasive effect of metadiscourse, it seemed that the English and Persian informants chose the most persuasive texts according to their cultural preferences.