TY - JOUR
T1 - "It is imperative to ..."
T2 - Importance markers and the construction of newspaper discourse
AU - Ngai, Jonathan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Discourse functions
KW - Evaluation
KW - Evaluative meaning
KW - Importance markers
KW - Textual colligation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85047309715&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047309715
VL - 5
SP - 156
EP - 169
JO - Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics
JF - Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics
IS - 1
ER -