Gender and metadiscourse in British and Saudi newspaper column writing: male/female and native/non-native differences in language use

The topic of gender differences has proved to be a popular line of inquiry for language and gender researchers for decades, and the recent growing interest in the pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse makes it a major domain in the research of discourse analysis and corpus-based analyses. This study extends the investigation of gender and metadiscourse to newspaper opinion columns. The study seeks to explore both gender and metadiscourse in written media texts by analyzing a corpus of British and Saudi newspaper opinion columns. Using corpus-linguistics techniques, the study aims to investigate gender differences in the opinion writings of men and women columnists regarding their use of metadiscourse and selected linguistic and stylistic features. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, the study further aims to compare the use of metadiscourse markers among British and Saudi columnists in order to identify which metadiscourse categories predominate in this type of newspaper discourse and how they are distributed according to cross-cultural preferences. The corpus consists of 320 opinion columns totaling 273,773 words, 160 columns written by British writers and 160 columns by Saudi writers selected from four elite newspapers, the British The Times and The Guardian, and the Saudi ones The Saudi Gazette and The Arab News. The 320 columns were searched electronically using concordancing software programs and then all the metadiscourse devices were examined qualitatively in context to determine their actual functions. All frequencies reported have been normalized per 1,000 words to allow for accurate comparisons and tested statistically. Results confirmed that there were 33,854 metadiscourse tokens in the corpus, an average of 105.49 occurrences per opinion column or 3 elements of metadiscourse in every 25 words in each of the two corpora: British and Saudi. Findings revealed both male and female columnists in both groups showed more similarities than differences in their overall use of metadiscourse especially in the interactive dimension. In spite of that, some statistical significant gender-based variations among columnists in the use of interactional dimension of metadiscourse were also found. Female columnists used more self-mentions, more engagement markers, more adjectives, more pronouns, and more adverbs than their male counterparts, and tended to adopt a personalized engaging subjective style that relies on personal experiences in their writing about domesticity, family, and ‘feminine’ concerns. In contrast, male columnists used more hedges, verbs, numerical terms, swear words, articles, and prepositions, and tended to adopt a more factual informative style and provide more verifiable information to support their arguments in their texts about politics, economies, education, sports, and other masculine topics. In addition, results revealed that British and Saudi columnists made use of both interactive and interactional metadiscourse, and some statistically significant variations in the amount and type of metadiscourse were reported. The study reported that metadiscourse is a useful concept in the journalistic discourse of opinion columns because, through its devices, it helps to expose the presence of a writer, organize the text, facilitate communication, aid comprehension, and allow the writer to build a relationship with readers. The study concludes that gender is a significant source of variation that influences the linguistic and the stylistic choices of opinion columnists along with the genre’s conventions.