Seyedeh Elham Elhambakhsh; Forugh Amirjalili; Elham Kashefi
Abstract
As covert socio-cultural relations have significant effects on language, these norms are reflected in linguistic and generic structure of public death notices as a distinctive genre. This study intended to identify the different genres of death notices (e.g. memorial advertisements, obituaries, funeral ...
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As covert socio-cultural relations have significant effects on language, these norms are reflected in linguistic and generic structure of public death notices as a distinctive genre. This study intended to identify the different genres of death notices (e.g. memorial advertisements, obituaries, funeral announcements/posters, memorial cards, etc.) and to conduct a comparative genre analysis of memorial cards (MCs) in English and funeral/memorial announcements (FMAs) in Persian using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The data included 22 English MCs and 40 Persian FMAs (average 80 words). The results of bottom-up analyses of different moves and steps in the 2 genres in focus revealed that, there were more similarities between English MCs and Persian FMAs than differences. Both languages introduced the deceased person, included literary or religious texts, signatures, names of the clergyman invited and included the date, time, and address of the memorial ceremony in their MCs and FMAs. While English MCs included the dates of birth and death of the deceased person and a word of acknowledgement, the Persian FMAs distinguished different types of ceremonies and named and invited the relatives, friends, or acquaintances. The results can benefit L2 writers to master the predominant structural patterns and the reflected cultural differences.
Seyedeh Elham Elhambakhsh; Masoome Jalalian
Abstract
To win the attention of the audience, presidential candidates rely on their own rhetorical methods. Hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers have been the focus of many studies as the communicative strategies enabling speakers to soften the force of utterances or moderate their assertive force. TV ...
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To win the attention of the audience, presidential candidates rely on their own rhetorical methods. Hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers have been the focus of many studies as the communicative strategies enabling speakers to soften the force of utterances or moderate their assertive force. TV news was used as the corpus of this study, whereas most of the previous studies have focused on examining newspaper presidential debates. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of hedges and boosters in TV election debates of the two presidential candidates - a principalist and a reformist. Three televised debates made by Hassan Ruhani and Bagher Ghalibaf were identified and classified based on the framework proposed by Jalilifar and Alavi-Nia (2012) and Alavi-Nia and Jalilifar (2013). Then, qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to identify the frequency and the function of the hedges and boosters. The results of the analyses and chi-square tests revealed that, in spite of some similarities, there were great differences in the use of hedges and boosters between the candidates. In other words, they had different tendencies toward using these techniques, and eventually Dr. Ruhani could win the battle due to using such metadiscourse devices.
