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Title:
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The Management of Writer-Reader Interaction in Argumentative Discourse: A contrastive analysis of English, Spanish and Italian newspaper editorials
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Author:
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Antonello Maddalena
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Bari
, Teoria e Prassi della Traduzione
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Degree Date:
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2006
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Applied Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Text/Corpus Linguistics
Typology
Translation
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Subject Language(s):
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English
Italian
Spanish
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Director(s):
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Domenico Torretta
Isabel Alonso
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Abstract:
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This study sets out to contrastively describe a multilingual corpus of
newspaper editorials in American English, British English, Peninsular
Spanish and Italian. It was hypothesized that the contrastive
characterization of these texts would permit to establish how writers
coming from different cultural backgrounds manage the writer-reader
interaction and what textual strategies they use to accomplish the reader's
agreement.
Texts composing the corpus were selected from quality newspapers of
different ideological and political backgrounds, namely, The Washington
Post, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune for the American English
section; The Times, The Guardian, The Independent for the British English
sub-corpus; El Mundo, El Pais, ABC, for Peninsular Spanish and, lastly, Il
Corriere della Sera, L'Unità and La Stampa for the Italian language.
Texts were analysed with Tirkkonen-Condit's method (1985) specifically
created to unravel the inner workings of argumentative texts. It is a
complex and composite analytical tool which yields a holistic vision of
texts, since it looks at them in their entirety, giving insights into both
local and global aspects. Additionally, the method contemplates the
writer-reader interaction and one of the main goals of the dissertation was
to demonstrate that there are differences in the management of this
interaction in each language.
The analysis of the tri-lingual corpus revealed quantitative and
qualitative differences which were interpreted from an interactive
perspective. For example, American English editorialists utilize a far
larger amount of subordinate roles than their Spanish counterparts. These
subordinate roles are intended to facilitate the reader's agreement.
NOTE: The Ph.D. dissertation was completed under co-tutorship, meaning that the degree is recognized both in Italy and in Spain.
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