Contrastive Analysis of Metadiscourse Markers in English and Turkish Death Notices

The aim of this study is to compare the discourse structures of death notices written in various cultural contexts, using interpersonal metadiscourse model as a theoretical framework. The distribution of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers in death notices published in English and Turkish newspapers was examined to determine how these markers contribute to discourse organization. To achieve this goal, the document analysis method—one of the qualitative research approaches—was employed. The corpus of the study comprises 557 death notice texts (33,618 words; 449 in English and 108 in Turkish), systematically coded and analyzed for interactive and interactional markers under this model. The study found that while the frequency of interactive markers was similar in both cultures, significant cross-cultural differences emerged in the distribution and normalized frequency values (calculated per 1000 words) of interactional markers, which show how the writer influences the reader, were different. Turkish, for instance, did not employ any hedges. Attitude markers were the most commonly used interactional metadiscourse markers in both languages, and the use of euphemistic language use was often preferred to express the event of death. This cross-cultural variation underlines how cultural norms shape linguistic choices in sensitive events like death, thereby demonstrating the sociological embeddedness of discourse. By addressing an understudied genre within a cross-cultural framework, the study contributes to the fields of discourse analysis, genre studies, and intercultural pragmatics.