Title: The function of discourse markers in Arabic newspaper opinion articles
Abstract: The present study examines the function of discourse markers in Arabic newspaper opinion articles. In this study, discourse markers are not only connectingwords that contribute to the cohesion of text, but they are also crucial tools for achieving communicative act in the text. These expressions that come from different grammatical classes and mostly occur sentence-initially function across sentence boundaries to connect textual units above the sentence and to guide and influence the text-receivers’ interpretation throughout the text. Because of the crucial communicative role of discourse markers, they are important elements in text production and perception. The main goal of this study is to identify discourse markers that are used in Arabic newspaper opinion articles and describe their function at two levels of text structure, i.e. the sentence and the paragraph. To this effect, the study analyzes 50 texts that form the data in the study, taking a semantic/pragmatic relation-based approach. The analytical model employed in this study consists of three steps. The first step is segmenting the texts into paragraphs and sentences. The second step is describing the functional relations that connect units of texts at each level. Two descriptive tools are employed: the Rhetorical Structure Theory to describe relations between sentences and
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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Cited By Count: 33
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