A Cross-Cultural Study of Argumentative Discourse

This book seeks to uncover some of the underpinnings of constructing argumentation in English and Arabic media discourse. It investigates the process of creating and sharing meaning among people from English and Arabic cultural backgrounds. As never before, people around the globe are more connected today and communication across world languages and cultures has reached the very peak. This situation makes it imperative to look at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures.Choosing newspaper editorials, as a journalistic professional genre, fits well for this purpose because editorial style is known to be less contaminated by the effects of translation from foreign sources than that which may occur in news reports. The editorial, in a major newspaper at least, typically represents the metropolitan values of a society. In this respect, editorials from different languages and cultures constitute useful opinion sources for obtaining contrastive analyses for language students, teachers, and global professionals.