A Corpus-based Study of the Type and Frequency of Attitude Markers in Iran’s Stores and Markets

Metadiscourse is considered as a sort of new approach representing the ways language producers act their language through written or spoken texts for interacting with their readers or listeners. Attitude markers are a component of metadicourse. As it is rare to see studies conducted on metadicourse markers in informal and real situations especially in Persian language, the current study aiming at compensating the gap of not paying attention to attitude markers in real conversations in Iran, investigated attitude markers in Iran’s stores and markets in terms of frequency. In this regard, a corpus composed of 210 min of the real conversations among 35 salesmen and 80 customers in Tehran was provided followed by counting all of the words, short sentences, and phrases conveying personal and attitudinal information (Gholami, Tajali, Shokrpour, 2014) as attitude markers. The results revealed that the salesmen used attitude markers so much more frequent than that of the customers regarding the type of the attitude markers used by the participants, it was discovered that the salesmen and customers tend to express their attitude mostly through adjectives. However, not a considerably lower frequency for the customer’s use of the attitude markers delivered by phrase and short sentences was founded.