“It is imperative to …”: Importance markers and the construction of newspaper discourse
The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Volume 5, Issue 1. March 2018
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Keywords

evaluation
evaluative meaning
importance markers
discourse functions
textual colligation

How to Cite

Ngai, J. (2018). “It is imperative to …”: Importance markers and the construction of newspaper discourse. The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(1), 156–169. Retrieved from https://caes.hku.hk/ajal/index.php/ajal/article/view/519

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.
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