264 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón
- Research questions
The research questions investigated in this study are the following:- Is there any difference in the selection of thematic features between English
and Spanish news reports, on the one hand, and commentaries, on the other? - If there is a difference, is it language-specific or does it reflect the communica-
tive purposes of the two genres?
These research questions are investigated by means of an empirical analysis of
a comparable bilingual sample of news reports and commentaries, as described
below. - Corpus data
The data used for this study is a bilingual comparable English-Spanish corpus
consisting of a total of thirty-two texts (sixteen news reports and sixteen com-
mentaries) evenly divided into English and Spanish texts. The criteria for text
comparability were both external and internal. External criteria included the year
of publication and the type of publication. All the texts were collected from pub-
lished sources between 2008 and 2009. As to the type of publication, the English
news commentaries, written by expert writers or journalists, were extracted from
the Project Syndicate, an international association of quality newspapers that pub-
lishes commentaries by prominent figures to the world’s foremost newspapers on
topics ranging from economics and political and international affairs to science
and philosophy. See <http://www.project-syndicate.org> The English news reports
were extracted from the news section of the online version of the Times. <http://
http://www.timesonline.co.uk> The Spanish texts were all extracted from the news and
opinion sections of El País digital <http://www.elpais.com>, one of the Spanish
high-circulation newspapers.
As for the internal criteria for text comparability we used the categories of
‘genre’, the systemic-functional category of ‘register’ and the notion of ‘text type’
(Biber 1988). The sample collection procedure was as follows.- In order to ensure genre comparability of our bilingual sample, we used the
classification provided by the CPCS Writing Portfolio of different newspaper
genres.^2 According to this classification, a news article or news report “should strive - This classification is available from the College of Public and Community Service of the
University of Massachusetts, Boston. Their web page can be consulted at http://www.cpcs.umb.
edu/support/studentsupport/academic/genres_newspaper.htm