Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 273
(32) First, the EU still spends far more of its resources subsidizing declining sectors
than preparing for the future.
Second, Europe has failed to introduce an independent European Research
Council to ensure that funding is allocated on the basis of scientific merit.
(Micro-Europe. Comment 4)
In the Spanish texts the difference in frequency of textual Themes in commentar-
ies (18.3%) and in news reports (14.5%) was not significant. In commentaries
the typical linkers are y (‘and’) and pero (‘but’) in 80% of the cases, while in news
reports there was a wider variety and more balanced distribution of elements (pese
a ello [‘in spite of that’], además [‘besides’], con todo [‘despite’], etc.).
With respect to the use of interpersonal Themes, it was found that their occur-
rence was insignificant in both languages and genres. In the English commen-
taries, the most frequent item was of course, while in the Spanish sample it was
quizás (‘perhaps/maybe’). This can be due to the fact that commentaries express
interpersonal meaning through other linguistic devices and do not rely so much
on thematisation for this purpose.
6.2 Thematic variation at discourse level
As explained in Section 5.2 above, our analysis considered three possibilities in
order to reveal possible differences in the discourse behaviour of thematic ele-
ments in the two newspaper genres and the two languages under study.
We first looked at the generic structure of news reports and commentaries and
analysed the function of the thematic elements in the different stages or moves.
For this analysis we followed Halliday and Hasan’s (1989) concept of Generic
Structure Potential (GSP), which focuses on the different moves or stages that
characterize different genres. The analysis of commentaries revealed a generic
structure similar to that of editorials (see Ansary and Babaii 2005) consisting of
the following moves:
Move 0 Headline
Move 1 Addressing the issue
Move 2 Outlining the arguments
Move 3 Articulating a positionThe optional elements distinguished by Ansary and Babaii for editorials, however,
are not so easily recognizable in our corpus of commentaries. Some back-and-
forth movement, mostly between exposition of facts (background information)
and what we could call evaluation, both within move 2, is the most clearly iden-
tifiable pattern. This is more manifest in English, where commentaries tend to