Thematic variation in English
and Spanish newspaper genres
A contrastive corpus-based study
Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón
The Complutense University of Madrid, SpainThis paper describes the thematic variation observed in two newspaper genres –
news reports and commentaries – in English and Spanish and studies the
influence of genre-specific and language-specific constraints on the observed
variation. The study is based on the contrastive analysis of certain clausal and
discourse-thematic features in a bilingual comparable corpus consisting of
a total of thirty-two texts (sixteen news reports and sixteen commentaries),
evenly divided into English and Spanish texts. The analysis shows that despite
the language-specific features which can be observed in certain thematic selec-
tions at clause level, most of the clausal and discourse thematic differences in
the material can be related to the different communicative purposes which char-
acterize these two genres. In view of the similarities and statistically significant
differences between the two genres in both languages, it is suggested that genre
is the major factor affecting the thematic variation in the bilingual sample, while
language-specific differences play a secondary role.Keywords: thematic variation, English, Spanish, newspaper, genre- Introduction
The study of journalistic discourse is an attractive and fruitful research domain
within contrastive studies. Journalistic texts, especially print-media ones, are
readily available and appear to form a relatively homogenous genre across lan-
guages and cultural groups. However, journalistic texts display considerable
generic variation both within and across the different media, languages and cul-
tures, as shown by the increasing number of studies focusing on a wide range of
linguistic, rhetorical, socio-political and ideological features characterising some
journalistic genres.