Análisis comparativo de las estrategias metadiscursivas en los comentarios de noticias en la prensa digital española y chilena

Open Access

Abstract

[EN] The big amount of comments that news receive nowadays are a challenge for linguistic studies as most of the intrinsic characteristics that compose this kind of discourse are unknown. In the same way, we also consider important in computer mediated communication the metadiscoursive strategies used to link a text or to communicate directly with readers and involve them in discourse. The main objective of this doctoral dissertation is to analyse the use of metadiscoursive strategies in the comments to digital news in two specific fields and in the two varieties of Spanish that are spoken in Spain and in Chile to detect if variation exists and if a digital context implies a different use of these strategies. The methodology followed to answer this objective was a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus that was compiled from the digital comments written from October 2012 to February 2013 in the digital newspapers El País (Spain) and Emol (Chile). The compilation of the corpus was carried out manually, being compiled 1,200 comments: 600 per each topic, i.e. sports and politics, and 600 hundred per each Spanish variety, i.e. from Spain and Chile. The tagging and analysis was performed with the tool UAM Corpus Tool. Each comment was also read in detail to tag all the metadiscourse strategies having into account Hyland's taxonomy (2005) that divides metadiscoursive language into interactive and interactional. The results showed the need to include new categories in the taxonomy described by Hyland (2005) as the nature of the digital comments is different from the metadiscourse strategies being studied commonly by researchers, i.e. in academic texts. This was the reason why in the case of interactive elements two sub-categories were added: phatic markers and exophoric markers. In the interpersonal elements it was also added the category of mention to third parties. On the other hand, it should be highlighted the fact that, in total, in the comments of El País (969.1 per 10,000 words) the ...