*M.A. Student, Department of Linguistics, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
**Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Associate Professor, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
***Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Assistant Professor, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Online published on 20 March, 2014.
This study motivated to examine the role of interpersonal metadiscourse markers such as hedges and boosters. In order to illuminate this relation, 27 front pages of widely read newspapers in US. were selected randomly from around 50 news about 9/11 events. Therefore, quantitative and qualitative methods were applied to answer the research questions to identify the frequency of hedge and booster employment. Moreover, to determine the supposedly meaningful differences between hedge and booster application in the corpus, the chi-square test was used. The findings showed that hedges were the most frequently used metadiscourse markers in English front page news articles. As the subcategories of hedging devices, probability adverbs occupied the highest position, while verbs as booster subcategories, were the most numerous devices used to describe writers’ certainty. It was concluded that journalists preferred to be conservative by using indirect strategies like adverbs and adjective employment about controversial issues like 9/11.
Discourse analysis, interpersonal metadiscourse markers, hedge and booster, Hyland, 9/11 English front page newspaper
