Discourse Markers at the Global Level in Arabic Newspaper Opinion Articles

This study aims to examine the function of discourse markers, henceforth DMs, at the global level in Arabicnewspaper opinion articles. DMs are expressions such as fa ‘since, for,’ hãkadhã ‘thus, and so,’ ghayra ’anna‘however, but’ that come from different grammatical classes and mostly occur sentence-initially. These expressionsare key elements in text production and perception because of their crucial role in connecting textual units above thesentence as well as guiding and influencing the text-receivers’ interpretation throughout the text. The study analyzes50 Arabic newspaper opinion articles in order to identify DMs that are used at the global level of text structure,i.e. the paragraph, and describe their function. It employs a three-step analytical model: segmenting the texts intoparagraphs, describing the functional relations that connect the paragraphs, and identifying DMs at the paragraphboundaries. Two descriptive tools are employed in this analysis: El-Shiyab’s (1990) organizational pattern ofArabic editorials’ text structure to describe the global relations between paragraphs, and Halliday’s (2004) thematicstructure analysis to identify the DMs at paragraph boundaries. Based on the description of the DMs’ environmentas well as the contribution of these items to their environment, the study suggests functional classifications for DMsat the paragraph level.