Contrastive analysis of interactional discourse markers in English and Spanish newspaper texts

Abstract

This chapter reports on the contrastive analysis of interpersonal discourse markers (IDMs) in a sample of English and Spanish newspaper texts in three genres: news reports, editorials and letters to the editor. The sample was divided into a training dataset of eighteen (English-Spanish) comparable texts and a larger dataset of 220 texts, divided into 60 news reports, 60 editorials and 100 letters to the editor. Following the methodology of Hovy & Lavid (2010), we present a preliminary annotation scheme validated by an inter-annotation agreement study. We then present the results of annotating the larger dataset, which reveals genre-related and language-specific variation in the distribution of IDMs in these newspaper genres. We discuss and provide some possible explanations for the results obtained.