282 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón
between moves. News reports, on the other hand, present a simpler generic struc-
ture than commentaries in both languages, with little contrastive differences other
than a more prominent evaluative tone of the Spanish reports. In both genres and
for both languages, hyper-Themes seem to be the clearest outward sign of transi-
tion from move to move and from sub-move to sub-move.
We have also seen that commentaries and reports tend to differ in the same
way in the two languages as regards the complexity of Themes, which are heavier
in commentaries than in reports. However, we have also seen some language-
specific differences, like the fact that these two genres are less differentiated in the
Spanish than in the English sample, reports tending to be more commented in
the former and therefore moving closer into the spectrum of commentaries. Also,
Themes tend to be heavier in Spanish than in English in both genres.
We bring this paper to an end in the belief that the results presented shed new
light on the study of such an elusive linguistic category as Theme. The corpus-
based, genre-oriented approach has proved to be of great help for the achieve-
ment of our goals. The statistically significant differences observed in the bilingual
corpus in the selection of certain clausal thematic features in news reports ver-
sus commentaries indicate a relationship between genre and thematic selection.
The exploratory analysis of the thematic variation observed at discourse level also
points to a possible relationship between genre and thematic choice, although
language-specific preferences also seem to play a role in the observed variation.
Further quantitative analysis of this variation at discourse level is currently under
way and will hopefully shed light on the influence of genre and language in the
thematic variation characterizing these two newspaper genres.ReferencesAlonso Belmonte, I. (coord.). 2007. Different Approaches to Newspaper Opinion Discourse.
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