Document Type : Research article
Authors
Department of English Language and Literature, Payame Noor University, Tehran
Abstract
The aim of this cross-cultural research was to investigate stance and engagement markers, as persuasive devices, in English and Persian Covid-19 related captions on Instagram pages posted by the health organizations in the United States and Iran. To this end, 740 captions were randomly collected from 6 American and Iranian health organizations accounts on Instagram from March 2020 to March 2021.The data were then analyzed for stance markers (i.e., hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions) and engagement markers (i.e., reader-pronouns, directives, questions, shared knowledge, and personal asides), and the findings were discussed in light of the theory of metadiscourse. The findings showed that there were differences in the use of persuasive devices between English and Persian corpora. While self-mention and hedges were the frequent stance markers in the English corpus, booster and attitude markers were frequently found in the Persian corpus. Moreover, reader pronouns and directives were the most frequently used engagement markers in English and Persian. In addition, the overall use of stance markers was higher than engagement markers in the two corpora, meaning that the Instagram users adopted a more writer-oriented approach.
Keywords
- computer-mediated communication
- Covid-19
- cross-cultural study
- engagement
- metadiscourse markers
- stance
Main Subjects
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