Textuality in Online News Paper Articles

Abstract

Textuality is a key concept in text linguistics. It is a property that a text must have in order to be regarded as a good text. In this paper, an attempt is made to arrive at the aspects of textuality utilized in online newspaper articles. More precisely, the paper endeavors to answer the following question: what are the most prevalent aspects of textuality utilized in this kind of discourse? As such, this paper aims at identifying the most common aspects of textuality exploited in online newspaper articles. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that cohesion, coherence, and informativity are the most prevalent aspects of textuality utilized in online newspaper articles. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, De Beaugrande and Dressler’s (1981) model of textuality is utilized for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. The analysis is executed on six articles retrieved from online British newspapers, namely, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and Express. Findings of the analysis validate the above mentioned hypothesis.