Interactional meta-discourse and phraseology in newspaper editorials during the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

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.