The linguistic Argumentative Strategies of Journalistic Language Written in English by Native Speakers and Arabs: A Comparative Study

Each language has its own rhetorical conventions, which are unique to it. These conventions may express cultural preferences in the organization of ideas. But the tendency to prefer an argumentative style or format to another does not mean that the language lacks that style, but it means that, for certain reasons, language users prefer a certain style to the other. The aim of this study is to investigate the argumentative strategies that the native English speakers and Arab journalists tend to employ in the English political journalistic discourse, which discusses issues that represent a journalist’s point of view. Argumentation in the context of this study is the form of discourse that attempts to persuade and influence readers through the use of a connected series of conceptual relations, violation, value, significance and opposition in order to establish apposition or claim. The data of the study is collected from forty journalistic articles written in English in four newspapers, and analyzed according to B. Hatim’s format of argument structure (1989a, 1991, and 1997).