Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 265
to remain objective and should use neutral language while presenting a diversity
of opinions, voices, and perspectives of the event, incident, or issue under discus-
sion.” A news commentary, just like an editorial or an op-ed, “presents the writer’s
opinion on an issue of current public interest.”
- In order to ensure register comparability, a modest register analysis was car-
ried out to ensure the similarity of the English and the Spanish texts across the
features of ‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’ (Butt et al. 2000: 5). With respect to ‘field’, all
the texts collected dealt with economic matters, each bilingual pair of texts sharing
the same ‘topic’. The ‘tenor’ of the texts involved similar participants with similar
statuses and roles in the English and the Spanish texts. In the case of commen-
taries, the writer was, in most cases, a well-known politician, journalist or intel-
lectual. The ‘mode’ includes features like the channel of communication which is
written in both genres and monologic. In the case of news articles it may include
occasional dialogic interventions. It also includes the rhetorical mode, or text type,
according to Butt et al. The overall rhetorical mode is expository in news reports,
while it is usually persuasive or argumentative in commentaries. As to the textual
dimensions according to which texts can be classified into types (Biber 1988),
news reports would be examples of informational production while commentaries
would be examples of involved production.
The bilingual sample collected is outlined in Appendix 1. It consists of a total
of 32 texts, divided into two groups: 16 news reports (8 English and 8 Spanish)
and 16 commentaries (8 English and 8 Spanish). The English sample consisted of
a total of 404 clauses (10,288 words). The Spanish sample consisted of a total of
222 clauses (6,791 words). The texts are listed in Appendix 1. - Analysis methodology
Our analysis focused on a number of clausal and discourse thematic features of
the comparable English-Spanish sample. The analysis of the clausal thematic fea-
tures was both qualitative and quantitative. The analysis of the discourse thematic
features was only qualitative, given its exploratory nature.
5.1 Clausal thematic features
The analysis of the clausal thematic features focused on certain thematic catego-
ries proposed in Lavid et al.’s (2010) model of thematisation, which extends and
reformulates the Systemic-Functional category of Theme, as studied by Halliday
and Matthiessen (2004). In Lavid et al.’s model, the thematic structure of the clause
is divided into two distinct functional zones or fields: the Thematic Field and the