Move Structures and Stance Adverbials in Editorials From The Bangkok Post and The New York Times
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Abstract
Apart from the fact that there are no fixed rules for writing newspaper editorials, there is no single study incorporating both analyses of moves and stance adverbials in online English newspaper editorials from The Bangkok Post in comparison to those from an international online English newspaper from another country. The aims of the present study include 1). exploring the move structure of editorials from The Bangkok Post and The New York Times, 2). finding stance adverbials in each move, and 3). identifying the positions of the stance adverbials found in each move. 60 editorials from 2017 to 2019 with the length of 550-700 words whose purpose is to call for action were selected from each newspaper archive. A list of stance adverbials and a proposed move structure were employed for identifying the moves and stance adverbials. ANTCONC was used as a tool for counting the frequencies (converted into percentages and normalized frequencies afterwards) and identifying the positions of stance adverbials. In both corpora, most of the editorials contain the sequence of Move 1-Move 2-Move 3-Move 4 (1234 or MS1). Furthermore, other outstanding move sequences include Move 1-Move 2- Move 3- Move 2-Move 3- Move 4 (123234 or MS2) and Move 1-Move 3- Move 2- Move 3- Move 4 (13234 or MS3). Epistemic stance adverbials were found two times more frequently than attitudinal stance adverbials and about seven times more frequently than style stance adverbials. The most prevalent sub-categories of epistemic stance adverbials are doubt/certainty, source of knowledge, and actuality, whereas the most outstanding attitudinal stance adverbials are importance and evaluation. Those showing importance were more frequently used in The Bangkok Post than those showing evaluation, but this is reversed in The New York Times. Whether these findings were influenced by the L1 of the writer, cultural differences, and institutional practices could be carried out in additional research.
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