Comparing thematic features in English and Spanish: A functional analysis of two newspaper genres

Abstract

Abstract This study is a contrastive description of the clausal thematic features which characterize two newspaper genres -news articles and editorials- in English and Spanish with the aim to determine whether the choices are due to language-specific or to genre specific constraints. The sample used for the study consists of a comparable sample of thirty two texts, sixteen in English and sixteen in Spanish, collected along a number of external and internal criteria to ensure generic, registerial and text type comparability in both languages. The contrastive analysis focuses on three main thematic features: (1) the experiential elements selected as Thematic Heads, (2) the textual and nterpersonal thematic choices; (3) the syntactic features of the Thematic Heads and Pre-heads. The results of the analysis indicate that, though there are some language-specific tendencies, genre-specific constrains seem to be the determining factor in the selection and syntactic realization of the thematic features of the two newspaper genres investigated in this study.