Exploring Stance and Engagement Markers in Covid-19 Related CMC

Farnia, Maryam; Hashemi, Samira

doi:10.22051/lghor.2024.45458.1872

Exploring Stance and Engagement Markers in Covid-19 Related CMC

Document Type : Research article

Authors

Maryam Farnia ¹
Samira Hashemi ²

¹ Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

² MA in English Language Teaching, Department of English Language and Literature, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

10.22051/lghor.2024.45458.1872

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

Main Subjects

Linguistics

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