LINGUIST List 17.1675
Sat Jun 03 2006
Diss: Applied Ling: Maddalena: 'The Management of Writer-Reader Int...'
Editor for this issue: Meredith Valant
<meredithlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Antonello
Maddalena,
The Management of Writer-Reader Interaction in Argumentative Discourse: A contrastive analysis of English, Spanish and Italian newspaper editorials
Message 1: The Management of Writer-Reader Interaction in Argumentative Discourse: A contrastive analysis of English, Spanish and Italian newspaper editorials
Date: 02-Jun-2006
From: Antonello Maddalena <marziano60hotmail.com>
Subject: The Management of Writer-Reader Interaction in Argumentative Discourse: A contrastive analysis of English, Spanish and Italian newspaper editorials
Institution: Ph.D. in co-tutorship between University of Bari and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
Program: Teoria e Prassi della Traduzione
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Antonello Maddalena
Dissertation Title: The Management of Writer-Reader Interaction in Argumentative Discourse: A contrastive analysis of English, Spanish and Italian newspaper editorials
Linguistic Field(s):
Applied Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Italian (ita)
Spanish (spa)
Dissertation Director:
Isabel Alonso
Domenico Torretta
Dissertation Abstract:
This study sets out to contrastively describe a multilingual corpus ofnewspaper editorials in American English, British English, PeninsularSpanish and Italian. It was hypothesized that the contrastivecharacterization of these texts would permit to establish how writerscoming from different cultural backgrounds manage the writer-readerinteraction and what textual strategies they use to accomplish the reader'sagreement.
Texts composing the corpus were selected from quality newspapers ofdifferent ideological and political backgrounds, namely, The WashingtonPost, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune for the American Englishsection; The Times, The Guardian, The Independent for the British Englishsub-corpus; El Mundo, El Pais, ABC, for Peninsular Spanish and, lastly, IlCorriere della Sera, L'Unità and La Stampa for the Italian language.
Texts were analysed with Tirkkonen-Condit's method (1985) specificallycreated to unravel the inner workings of argumentative texts. It is acomplex and composite analytical tool which yields a holistic vision oftexts, since it looks at them in their entirety, giving insights into bothlocal and global aspects. Additionally, the method contemplates thewriter-reader interaction and one of the main goals of the dissertation wasto demonstrate that there are differences in the management of thisinteraction in each language.
The analysis of the tri-lingual corpus revealed quantitative andqualitative differences which were intepreted from an interactiveperspective. For example, American English editorialists utilize a farlarger amount of subordinate roles than their Spanish counterparts. Thesesubordinate roles are intended to facilitate the reader's agreement.
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