وظائف "كما" النصية في الخطاب الصحفي : نظرية التركيب البلاغي
The study aims at examining the functions of the discourse marker Kama in the Arabic journalistic
discourse in the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson
(1987). To this end, the study compiled a small-scale corpus of journalistic discourse taken from
two prominent Arabic news websites: Aljazeera.net and Alarabia.net. The corpus covers three
distinct sub-genres of journalistic discourse: opinion articles, news reports, and sport reports.
The journalistic discourse is chosen on the basis that it is considered as the best representative
of the contemporary written Arabic and it receives a wide readership in the Arabic-speaking
countries. The motivation for the study is that although it is frequently used in the written form
of Arabic (particularly in the language of Arabic media), the discourse marker kama is largely
neglected and very few has been said about it in the present literature on Arabic discourse
markers. The current findings show that kama is found to achieve 290 occurrences in the corpus
under investigation. This obviously indicates that kama is commonly used in the language of
Arabic journalistic discourse, which calls for paying attention to its usage in such a type of
discourse. In the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson
(1987), kama was found to serve four common functions: elaboration (around 50 %), similarity
(around 19 %), evidence (16 %), and exemplification (13 %). Two functions of kama (similarity
and exemplification) are listed in RST while the other two are incorporated