Commitment and subjectivity in the discourse of opinion columns and leading articles: A corpus study

Abstract

This paper explores the expression of author commitment to the validity of the information, and the degree of subjectivity or intersubjectivity involved in the presentation of the information in two genres of newspaper discourse, opinion columns and leading articles. The dimension of author commitment is analysed in terms of the parameters: evidentiary validity and degree of certainty. The dimension of subjectivity is studied on the basis of the interaction between two parameters: the degree of salience and explicitness of the role of the subject of conception, and expression of personal vs. shared responsibility for the information. The results of the corpus study indicate that there are no significant differences between the two genres regarding the dimension of author commitment. These two genres within the domain of argumentative discourse, however, differ in the dimension of subjectivity. As is to be expected, there is a greater degree of salience of conceptualizer role and more overt shared responsibility in opinion columns than in leading articles.

Key words: Newspaper discourse, opinion columns, leading articles, author commitment, degree of subjectivity, corpus analysis-