Metadiscourse revisited: a contrastive study of persuasive writing in professional discourse. Regreso al metadiscurso: estudio contrastivo de la persuasión en el discurso profesional

Resumen

The research presented in this paper explores the role of metadiscourse in persuasive texts written by professional writers in two leading newspapers: the Spanish El País and the British The Times. The aim of this cross-linguistic investigation is to compare how professional writers organise their texts, guide their readers through them and build a relationship with their audience. The use of both textual and interpersonal metadiscaurse categories is examined from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The results suggest that two major variables interact in the choice of metadiscourse categories in newspaper opinion articles: culture-driven preferences and genre-driven conventions. Regarding culture-driven preferences this study shows significant cross linguistic variation in the frequency of textual metadiscourse categories used, particularly those involved in the construction of arguments and in the inclusion of subsidiary information. As for interpersonal metadiscourse, the analysis reveals that, despite certain interlinguistic variation, there is relative uniformity in the number of interpersonal markers used in English and Spanish newspaper articles. This result, while contravening earlier studies comparing English-Spanish texts, supports the hypothesis that the use of certain metadiscourse markers is also dictated by genre conventions.