ASIDES İN TURKISH POLITICAL NEWSPAPER INTERVIEWS

The newspaper genre is generally accepted as one of the most important exam-ples of the persuasive text genre. ‘Asides' are the short dialogues inserted byjournaliststogivetheirpersonalcommentsonthesubjectbeingreported. Theytherefore play a crucial role for journalists to persuade their readers and inter-act with them. Interviews are one of thecharacteristic features of newspaperdiscourse. This study examines the usage of asides in political interviews con-ducted with prominent politicians in Turkey. The data consisted of eighty polit-ical interviews published in seven elite mainstream newspapers which had dif-ferent ideologies, four pro-government and three anti-government. In line withthe aim of the study, the research uses a descriptive survey design. Quantita-tive and qualitative methods are applied using the methodologies of both Cor-pus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The asides in the interviewsare identiβied using Temmerman's (2013) classiβication of asidesand Hyland's(2005) taxonomy. Also, the corpus is analysed using the NooJ linguistic enginemodule. Theresultsshowthattherearevariationsintheuseanddistributionofasides in the data according to the politicians' and the newspapers' ideologies.