Interpersonal Metadiscourse in Western News Sites’ Coverage of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Corpus-Based Study

The current study applies Hyland’s (2005) comprehensive model of metadiscourse to study how writers of different news sites (mainstream news sites and alternative media news sites) use metadiscourse markers in their coverage of news related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of using different metadiscourse markers, especially when it comes to readers’ engagement with the presented texts. To elaborate more, the study examines how different metadiscursive strategies used by writers can reframe and reproduce different ideologies. For example, how the Alternative media news writers resorted to using more engagement markers to communicate the “hidden facts” about the “faked” Covid-19 pandemic and the “killer vaccines” directly to their readers, revealing the “truth” directly to their readers. Also, the study investigates how the use of metadiscourse markers can highlight the cooccurrence and confrontation of competing ideological manifestations and their role in persuasion. For the sake of the current study, an eclectic approach of Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis is used. In addition to the corpus linguistic analysis, the study applies the interactional dimension of the Interpersonal Metadiscourse Model (Hyland,2005). The data of the study 4,662,477 words collected from different Western news sites between January 2020 and December 2022. By observing the data, it was clear that certain news sites promote conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, the data was divided into two corpora: mainstream news corpus and alternative media news corpus. The mainstream news corpus includes 3,267,271 words collected from the following mainstream news sites: The Independent, The New York Times, and USA Today. The alternative media news corpus includes 1,395,206 words collected from the following alternative media news sites: Expose News, Clash Daily, and Before its News. The study highlights the ways in which writers of mainstream news sites and alternative media news sites use metadiscourse markers to persuade their readers with their ideologies about the Covid-19 pandemic; how ideology is embedded in their use of metadiscourse markers and how this use leads to conceptualizing metadiscourse as a strategy of persuasion.