Nowadays, universities heavily rely on digital marketing and social media to recruit more students and to generate interest in their schools. Digital marketing and online advertising constitute a kind of interaction between writers and their potential readers. This paper explores how such an interaction is achieved by investigating a wide range of linguistic resources that writers use to express their stance toward the content in the text and toward the reader. A corpus of 80 academic advertisements from 38 universities, totaling approximately 2,118 words, was compiled and analyzed using Hyland’s (2005b) interactional metadiscourse. The corpus was searched manually for all categories of interactional metadiscourse, and all the reported cases were examined in context to ensure their validity. The results revealed a statistically higher frequency of engagement markers than stance markers. This extensive use of engagement markers, particularly directives and reader pronouns, is a strong indicator of a high degree of interactionality, personalization, and reader consideration. Universities use these engagement features to position themselves and their students in the world of academia and in the context of interaction, where they can successfully focus students’ attention, acknowledge their presence, and guide them toward achieving mutual goals.
The massive influence of media in our daily life has led to an increased interest of analyzing media discourse among linguists. A newspaper editorial is a distinctive register of print media that expresses the newspaper’s opinion about current issues in the world. The present study showed the results of a linguistic comparative analysis of the language of newspaper editorials that are published recently during the Russia-Ukraine War. The investigation is based on samples taken from leading newspapers in the USA and the UAE. The corpus consists of 24 editorials totaling about 16,673 words written in English. The study aimed to investigate two fundamental principles of language use, namely: meta-discourse and phraseology in the genre of newspaper editorials adapting a quantitative content analysis approach. Hyland’s (2005b) interactional model of meta-discourse has been applied in the analysis. Data showed a high level of similarity between the USA and the UAE editorials in terms of frequency of several linguistic markers. Data also showed that stance markers were significantly higher than engagement markers in both corpora. Moreover, results reported a variety of use of collocations, modality, and idiomatic expressions. The study concluded that newspaper editorials are argumentative texts that are distinguished by the use of hedges, attitude markers, and other persuasive devices. The study combines key linguistic concepts and contributes to the field of discourse analysis as it provides useful insights about media discourse and newspaper discourse particularly editorials.
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