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Title Stance and Engagement in Support Groups: A Corpus-Based Study of Online Discourses

Author(s) Mr. Muzammal Iqbal Rana

Abstract This study has attempted to discover the Stance and Engagement features of Online Discourses. The researcher chose to study the language of Online Forums. Three domains of Online Forums that were forums for Mental Health, Physical Health and Social Issues were selected for study. The researcher found that there were no comparative researches conducted on the language of these forums from Metadiscourse perspective. So, this research has been done to fill that gap and, reveal and compare the data of selected forums. To conduct the research, the researcher compiled three corpora, everyone having half a million words. Ant Conc., a corpus software, was used for the analysis of data. To find Metadiscoursal features of corpora Hyland’s (2005) Metadiscourse model was applied. This model has two components i.e. Interactive and Interactional. The study investigated the Interactional component which is further divided into Stance and Engagement. Results showed that participants of Mental Health Forums used 1115.4 Stance Markers per ten thousand words. However, the users of Physical Health Forums and Social Issues Forums employed 883.58 and 725.84 Stance Markers per ten thousand words. Frequencies show that in MHC, online users were more committed to what they said and showed personal emotions towards propositions. Regarding Engagement features, results revealed that the participants of Physical Health Forums used 417.64 Engagement Markers per ten thousand words. Whereas the participants of Social Issues Forums and Mental Health Forums utilized 402.24 and 400.32 Engagement Markers per ten thousand words respectively. This means that online users in PHC were slightly keener to drag readers into the discussion using Engagement Markers (Hyland, 2005a). The results show that online users used Stance features more than Engagement features in their writings. The results of this research can be useful for people related to social work, the medical field or welfare. Moreover, it is envisaged that other researchers will also look into the language of online discourses as it has plenty of potential to be investigated.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2021-11-16

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