280 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón
Spanish reports through which the writer’s stance can be felt, in the fashion of
commentaries. This seems to be the case with Pese a ello (‘in spite of that’) in (40),
which, although in principle a textual Theme, allows the writer, speaking about
DSK, to minimize the IMF’s managing director’s acquittal and to focus on the
reprehensibility of his conduct:
(40) Pese a ello, los letrados recomiendan que se establezcan mayores exigencias
para su director gerente dada “su prominencia y las consecuencias para la
reputación” de la institución que representa.
(Una noche sin consecuencias para Strauss-Kahn. Report 1)
‘In spite of that, the lawyers recommend higher expectations from the manag-
ing director given his “prominence and the consequences for the reputation”
of the institution he represents.’- Summary and concluding remarks
In this study we have investigated the thematic variation observed in two newspa-
per genres in English and Spanish, news reports and commentaries. Our analysis
has shown that, in spite of the language-specific features which can be observed
in certain thematic selections at clause level, most of the clausal and discourse
thematic choices can be considered a reflection of the different communica-
tive purposes which characterize these two genres. Thus, news reports show a
preference for the choice of Sayers as Thematic Heads in clause complexes, thus
reflecting the news reporter’s tendency to remain neutral and attribute opinions
to external sources. In commentaries, by contrast, the predominant experiential
role as Thematic Head in both languages is the Carrier in a relational process,
which can be interpreted as a textual device used by writers to give their opinion
in what seems to be an objective and impartial way. Other relevant thematic fea-
tures revealed by the contrastive analysis are the use of concrete nouns realising
Thematic Heads in news reports in contrast to the preference for abstract nouns in
commentaries, and the preference for longer and more complex Noun Groups in
commentaries than in news reports. The use of textual Themes is only indicative of
the genre in the English sample, where they are used as textual signals to organize
the complex logico-semantic relations which characterize commentaries, while
news reports present information in a more straightforward way with the help of
other textual devices such as paragraphing.
Concerning the lexical content, it will be interesting in future research to
explore some detected frequency differences of certain realizations in reports and
commentaries. The figures in Table 4 seem to suggest that pero/but, no/not and