Corpus Based Study of Discourse Markers in the Pakistani English Newspaper Opinions “The News” Newspaper

Discourse markers are defined as a “glue” that binds pieces of knowledge together to bring reader's attention. The aim of this research is to find out the functions of metadiscourse markers in “The News” newspaper. This is a corpus based study consisting of 20000 words of data. The data is collected from the Pakistani English newspaper opinions (PENO) “The News” (TN) newspaper of one month Sep, 2019. This paper uses a mixed method approach, both qualitative and quantitative. This study is based on Hyland's model of DCs. The results of this study have been shown that DMs are used for coherence, as cohesive devices. This paper answers the questions of “what”, “why”, and “which”. The quantitative results of this study revealed that textual markers were used more frequently in PENO. The study is limited to sufficient amount of data. The study can prove helpful for researchers for further studies about functions of MMs.