"It is imperative to ...": Importance markers and the construction of newspaper discourse

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Abstract

Evaluation is concerned with the expression of opinion and can be expressed along different dimensions. Yet while evaluations marking certainty/doubt have attracted much linguistic interest, "importance-marking in relation to evaluation does not appear to have received very much attention" (Partington, 2014, p. 147). Evaluations of importance are central to the nature of academic discourse (Bondi, 2015). They are equally, if not more, essential to newspaper discourse, where they are used not only to express opinion, maintain writer-reader relations and structure the discourse but also to construct newsworthiness. Drawing on a 600,000-word specialized corpus of Hong Kong newspaper texts, this paper looks at the ways in which importance markers are used to construct two major newspaper genres: editorials and feature articles. The study has implications for future research as well as the teaching of reading and writing.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)156-169
Number of pages14
JournalAsian Journal of Applied Linguistics
Volume5
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Discourse functions
  • Evaluation
  • Evaluative meaning
  • Importance markers
  • Textual colligation

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