Metadiscoursal Features of Letters to Editor from Pakistani English Newspaper: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Metadiscourse features (MFs) uncover the way authors draw in with various writings and communicate with each other. MFs have been studied in Pakistani English Newspapers, especially in Letter to Editors. This is a corpus based study. 30 letters to Editors published in Dawn News have been taken from online electronic version of the internet. The present study actually has dealt Interactional category of Hyland’s model (2005). Interactional category consists subcategories: boosters, engagement markers, hedges, self-mentions and attitudinal markers. For having interactional markers, these markers have been lifted up in the current study for subcategories from Hyland’s (2005) model and textinspector.com: an online software. This study has found frequencies of Interactional markers in the developed corpus, also interpreted the functions of the identified markers in the corpus. The findings of the present research revealed that the letters to Editors were marked as writer responsible. It showed the frequent employment of Engagement markers and Self-mentions in order to develop the relation with the Editors and put the attention of the Editors toward the significant matter. The limitation of this study is that the more data, interactive features and other genres may be considered for further researches.