262 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón
In this paper we focus on two newspaper genres, namely news reports and
commentaries. These two genres have received varying attention in the linguis-
tic literature. While news reports have been extensively studied from different
perspectives (e.g van Dijk 1988; Bell 1991; Fairclough 1995; White 1997; Scollon
1998), newspaper commentaries have received less theoretical and empirical
attention, though contrastive work is offering interesting results for the descrip-
tion of opinion newspaper genres across languages and cultures (see e.g. Lavid et
al. 2009; Wang 2008a and 2008b; Dafouz 2008; Alonso Belmonte 2007; Tirkkonen-
Condit 1996).
We attempt to contribute to this contrastive line of research by focusing on
the thematic variation observed in English and Spanish news reports and com-
mentaries. More specifically, our main aim is to examine how English and Spanish
journalists initiate their clauses in these two newspaper genres and to investigate
the influence of genre-specific and language-specific constraints on the observed
variation.
Our analysis is carried out in the context of the CONTRANOT research proj-
ect, aimed at the creation and validation of contrastive (English-Spanish) func-
tional descriptions through corpus analysis and annotation.^1 Within this project,
the current study attempts to advance knowledge, from a contrastive perspective,
on the correlations between genre and thematic content, thus extending previous
research on this issue (see e.g. Lavid 2000; Eiler 1986; Francis 1989 and 1990;
Ghadessy 1995; Fries & Francis 1992; Nwogu & Bloor 1991).
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines some of the distinguish-
ing features of news reports and commentaries; Section 3 presents the research
questions motivating our work; Section 4 describes the bilingual corpus sample
and Section 5 the analysis methodology; Section 6 presents the analysis and dis-
cusses the results. Finally, Section 7 provides a summary and some concluding
remarks.- The characteristics of news reports and commentaries
As outlined above, the genre of ‘hard’ news reports has been extensively stud-
ied from different perspectives, probably due to the fact that mass-media news
reporting is “one of the most influential textual domains in contemporary society”,- The CONTRANOT project is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
under R&D Research Projects Programme (reference number FFI2008-03384). Dr. Julia Lavid,
as principal investigator, and the two co-authors of this paper, as members of the research group,
gratefully acknowledge the support of the Spanish authorities.