Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

268 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón

the different texts and see whether it is possible to identify patterns of thematic

development specific to each genre or sub-genre. A third possibility is to inspect

the inner structure of the Themes in order to determine whether different genres

are characterized by simple or complex thematic structures.

Our analysis considered these three possibilities from a qualitative perspec-

tive, with the aim of revealing possible patterns of cross-linguistic differences in

the structure of thematic elements at the discourse level. The results of this qualita-

tive analysis are explained in Section 6 below.

6. Results

The results of the contrastive analysis yielded interesting thematic differences in

the bilingual sample both at the clausal and at the discourse level of analysis. We

begin with the observed thematic difference at clause level.

6.1 Thematic differences at clause level

As explained in Section 5 above, we analysed a number of clausal thematic features

in our bilingual sample. These included: (a) the experiential role of the Thematic

Heads within the transitivity structure of the clause; (b) the semantic nature of the

noun groups realizing the Thematic Heads; (c) the internal complexity of the noun

groups realizing the Thematic Heads; (d) the textual and interpersonal Themes.

The results of the analysis for each of these thematic features are presented below.

6.1.1 Experiential roles of Thematic Heads

We observed both language-specific and genre-related choices of experiential roles

of the Thematic Heads in our bilingual sample.

The main language-specific choice was the preferred selection of processes as

PreHead in Spanish (15.4% in Spanish vs. 1.7% in English, p < 0.001), due to the

fact that Spanish is a pro-drop language which can encode the Thematic Head

(when functioning as subject) through the verbal inflection. This typological fea-

ture of Spanish results in a characteristic thematic structure whereby the lexical

part of the verb encoding the process (the roots agrav- and tien- underlined in (11)

and (12) below) functions as the PreHead, while the Thematic Head (in bold) is

encoded through the verbal suffix -a in (11) and -e in (12), respectively:

(11) Agrav-a la conducta de los acusados [..]

Aggravate 3psPresInd the behaviour of the accussed

‘The behaviour of the accused is aggravated’