A Corpus-Based Description of Discourse Markers in Arabic Sport Journalistic Texts

Asem Al-Khawaldeh, Norsimah Mat Awal, Intan Zainudin

Abstract


The aim of the present paper is to offer a corpus-based description of Arabic discourse markers in sport news journalistic discourse.  To this end, a corpus of 80 articles (around 40,000 words) was compiled from two prominent Arab news websites: Aljazeera.net and Alarabia.net. Both qualitative as well as quantitative methods of research were employed to characterize this phenomenon, based on Fraser's model (2005). Four issues were addressed in the present analysis: identification, classification, frequency, syntactic classes, and position. The study identified a set of 73 DMs and classified them into four classes: elaborative, contrastive, inferential, and temporal. The study indicated that DMs play a crucial role in the organization and interpretation of the Arabic sport text. They are found to relate text units to each other through signaling explicitly the semantic relationships between them. Moreover, the DMs in the study are drawn from various grammatical forms such as conjunction, adverbs, preposition. With respect to their position, the DMs showed strong tendency to occur sentence-initially. 


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