Dissecting Economic Op-Eds: An Annotation Schema for Editorials in Quality Newspapers

Abstract This study examines the rhetorical structure and sentiment dynamics of 82 economic opinion editorials authored by prominent commentators. Using a novel annotation schema, we analyze Functional Discourse Units (FDUs), polarity, entities, and opinion holders to uncover the linguistic and rhetorical strategies employed in economic op-eds. The findings reveal a predominance of negative evaluations, highlighting the critical tone characteristic of the genre. Description/Analysis and Context FDUs are the most frequent, reflecting the op-eds’ focus on situating economic issues within broader narratives. Annotation challenges, such as gradation of sentiment and irony, emphasize the complexity of evaluating economic discourse. Despite these challenges, high inter-annotator agreement in key categories supports the robustness of the schema. This study bridges computational linguistics and discourse analysis, offering valuable insights into economic journalism while laying a foundation for future research on evaluative language and sentiment analysis in specialized corpora.