Interaction in Business Discourse: A Comparative Study of the Journalistic Stance in Pakistani English Newspapers

The current study explores the authorial presence in the journalistic business discourse by comparing the use of two interactional features of hedges and boosters in the business news-reports and the business columns. The data comprised the corpus of business news-reports and the business columns of 0.45 million and 0.65 million words, respectively. This corpus was drawn from four widely circulated Pakistani English dailies i.e., The Dawn, The Business Recorder, The Nation and The Daily Times. AntConc 3.4.4, a corpus tool, was used to identify total frequency occurrences of the lexical resources of hedges and boosters. The study also enlists and compares ten more frequently used expressions of hedges and boosters in the corpus to establish that the business columns are more interactive than the business news-reports. It is envisaged that the ESP syllabus designers and educationists may benefit from the findings of the study to develop effective teaching materials to improve the English communication skills of the business students