خلاصة:
The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives
media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van
Dijk, 1996). This potential is realized via different linguistic
resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal
resources. The major aim of this study was to explore how and in
what distribution these resources are employed by writers with
different cultural backgrounds to fulfill persuasive objectives in
the genre of newspaper editorials. Based on Hyland's (2005)
interpersonal taxonomy, a total of eighty newspaper editorials
from four elite newspapers (two Iranian and two American) were
analyzed and compared. The results revealed some differences
between the two groups of editors (Iranian group and American
group) in terms of the number of metadiscoursal elements used in
their editorials. For instance, the native speaker group proved to
be more confident in using interactional and interpersonal
metadiscourse markers more frequently than the non-native
group, which can be attributed to genre and language ownership
on the part of the native speaker group. It can also be related to
the contrast often made between writer-responsibility vs. reader-
responsibility cultures (Hinds, 1987). On the whole, cultural
upbringing, genre and language ownership, as well as different
rhetorical considerations may play key roles in the type and
frequency of metadiscoursal elements used in public domain
discourses.
ملخص الجهاز:
In Iran, one can mention two major studies of such nature: First, Abdollahzadeh's (2007) cross-linguistic study of metadiscourse use in Persian and English newspaper editorials, and second Noorian and Biria's (2010) contrastive study of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in Iranian newspapers' opinion columns.
To add to this slim literature, the current study aimed at exploring the preferences of Anglo-American (native speakers of English) and Iranian (non-native speakers of English) writers in terms of the use of interactional metadiscourse resources in the genre of newspaper editorials.
Our main question to address was whether there are any differences in the use of such interactional metadiscourse elements as hedges, boosters, self-mention, attitude, and engagement markers between the two cultural groups of writers.
Hyland's (2005a) model encompasses two categories for metadiscourse, "interactive" and "interactional", The former concerns with ways of organizing discourse to fit into the reader's background knowledge and reflect the writer's assessment of what needs to be made explicit to constrain and guide what can be recovered from the text; the latter deals with the writer's efforts to control the level of dialogic relationship to establish an appropriate relationship to his/her propositions, arguments, and audience (reader and listener), marking an appropriate degree of intimacy, the expression of attitude, the communication of commitment, and the reader involvement.
CONCLUSION This paper was a contrastive study of two groups of newspaper editorials, one from Anglo-American and the other from Iranian writers, in terms of their use of metadiscourse elements.
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