Age and Gender Differences in L2 Metadiscourse Markers of Stance in Facebook Interactions: A Corpus-Based Study

Document Type : Academic research papers

Authors

1 English Department, Sadat Academy for Management Sciences

2 Department of English,Faculty of Arts,Helwan university

3 English Department, Faculty of Languages and Translation, Sadat Academy

4 Helwan university

Abstract

One of the most popular social networking sites nowadays is Facebook where millions of users have found a suitable platform to sketch their personal experiences; present their own perspectives, comments, and reflections; and express their own feelings. This study investigates the use of certain features of authorial stance, namely hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention, in 1500 Facebook status update posts written in English by 200 Egyptian male and female (M/F) students as well as 200 Egyptian M/F academic staff. The theoretical and analytical framework for this study is Hyland’s (2005a, b) Model of Interaction which was originally proposed for academic texts. The present study involves extending the application of this model to online Facebook interactions. The freeware corpus analytic toolkit AntConc (version 3.5.8) is used for concordancing and posts’ analysis. The results revealed only marginal age differences regarding the frequency of using boosters and attitude markers, where students topped academic staff albeit with a narrow margin. Gender differences were observed in the higher use of self-mention by the female groups as opposed to the male groups, and in gender-related preferences of certain categories of hedging and certain markers of attitude.

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Buhūth
Volume 1, Issue 10 - Serial Number 10
The tenth issue, part three, languages and literature
October 2021
Pages 83-111

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