A contrastive analysis of the engagement markers used in comments on digital news in Spain and Chile

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to determine and analyse the engagement markers used in the comments on the news published in the online papers El País (Spain) and Emol (Chile). The comments were selected from two different contexts: politics and sports. In this study we consider engagement markers as part of interactional metadiscourse, that is, the elements that involve readers to call their attention or to include them as participants of discourse (Hyland, 2005a). In this research, a corpus of 2,400 comments were compiled and tagged manually and with UAM Corpus Tool. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the metadiscoursal strategies used as engagement markers. The results showed that the writers that comment news in Emol and in El País used a similar amount of engagement markers; on the other hand, significative variation was not identified in the use of engagement markers in comments on politics and sports, although these markers were more frequently found in political comments.