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This is a contribution from Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics. Studies in honour of Stig Johansson. Edited by Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres A contrastive corpus-based study Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón The Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

This paper describes the thematic variation observed in two newspaper genres – news reports and commentaries – in English and Spanish and studies the influence of genre-specific and language-specific constraints on the observed variation. The study is based on the contrastive analysis of certain clausal and discourse-thematic features in a bilingual comparable corpus consisting of a total of thirty-two texts (sixteen news reports and sixteen commentaries), evenly divided into English and Spanish texts. The analysis shows that despite the language-specific features which can be observed in certain thematic selections at clause level, most of the clausal and discourse thematic differences in the material can be related to the different communicative purposes which characterize these two genres. In view of the similarities and statistically significant differences between the two genres in both languages, it is suggested that genre is the major factor affecting the thematic variation in the bilingual sample, while language-specific differences play a secondary role. Keywords: thematic variation, English, Spanish, newspaper, genre

1.

Introduction

The study of journalistic discourse is an attractive and fruitful research domain within contrastive studies. Journalistic texts, especially print-media ones, are readily available and appear to form a relatively homogenous genre across languages and cultural groups. However, journalistic texts display considerable generic variation both within and across the different media, languages and cultures, as shown by the increasing number of studies focusing on a wide range of linguistic, rhetorical, socio-political and ideological features characterising some journalistic genres. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

262 Julia Lavid, Jorge Arús and Lara Moratón

In this paper we focus on two newspaper genres, namely news reports and commentaries. These two genres have received varying attention in the linguistic literature. While news reports have been extensively studied from different perspectives (e.g van Dijk 1988; Bell 1991; Fairclough 1995; White 1997; Scollon 1998), newspaper commentaries have received less theoretical and empirical attention, though contrastive work is offering interesting results for the description of opinion newspaper genres across languages and cultures (see e.g. Lavid et al. 2009; Wang 2008a and 2008b; Dafouz 2008; Alonso Belmonte 2007; TirkkonenCondit 1996). We attempt to contribute to this contrastive line of research by focusing on the thematic variation observed in English and Spanish news reports and commentaries. More specifically, our main aim is to examine how English and Spanish journalists initiate their clauses in these two newspaper genres and to investigate the influence of genre-specific and language-specific constraints on the observed variation. Our analysis is carried out in the context of the CONTRANOT research project, aimed at the creation and validation of contrastive (English-Spanish) functional descriptions through corpus analysis and annotation.1 Within this project, the current study attempts to advance knowledge, from a contrastive perspective, on the correlations between genre and thematic content, thus extending previous research on this issue (see e.g. Lavid 2000; Eiler 1986; Francis 1989 and 1990; Ghadessy 1995; Fries & Francis 1992; Nwogu & Bloor 1991). The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines some of the distinguishing features of news reports and commentaries; Section 3 presents the research questions motivating our work; Section 4 describes the bilingual corpus sample and Section 5 the analysis methodology; Section 6 presents the analysis and discusses the results. Finally, Section 7 provides a summary and some concluding remarks. 2. The characteristics of news reports and commentaries As outlined above, the genre of ‘hard’ news reports has been extensively studied from different perspectives, probably due to the fact that mass-media news reporting is “one of the most influential textual domains in contemporary society”, 1. The CONTRANOT project is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under R&D Research Projects Programme (reference number FFI2008-03384). Dr. Julia Lavid, as principal investigator, and the two co-authors of this paper, as members of the research group, gratefully acknowledge the support of the Spanish authorities.

© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 263

reflecting its “social and ideological objectives” (White 1997: 101). White has studied this newspaper genre in depth and provided a detailed characterisation of its features and subtypes. In his study he distinguishes between two main types of news reports: the ‘event story’ and the ‘issues report’. In this paper we are interested in the second type, which White defines as “grounded in a communicative event – such as speeches, interviews and press releases”. Issues reports are classified as communicatively-based rather than event-based, and should strive to remain objective and use neutral language while presenting a diversity of opinions, voices, and perspectives of the event, incident, or issue under discussion. In fact, media training texts and guidelines of broadcasting services state that news reporting must be ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’. This is reflected in the semantics and lexicogrammar of news reporting, at least in the mainstream English-language press (White 1997). With the exception of British tabloids, news reporters avoid – or at least minimize – showing their interpersonal involvement in the text’s construction. Thus, for example, they avoid including explicit value judgments about the participants and the events in the news reports or confine contentious claims about causes and effects to the quotations of external sources. News commentaries, by contrast, are opinion articles with the important communicative function of contributing to the formulation of certain ‘preferred’ viewpoints about the world. The function of news commentaries within the larger context of newspaper coverage is “to offer newspaper readers a distinctive and sometimes authoritative voice that speaks to the public directly about matters of public importance” (Wang 2008a: 170). Usually written by academics, journalists and other experienced native language writers (Wang 2007: 3), they exert an important influence on political opinion, both on the everyday reader and on the institutional and/or elite members of a society (van Dijk 1988). Despite this clear difference between news reports as an interpersonally neutral genre and the interpersonally charged register of commentaries, they do not form a simple dichotomy, but rather a cline on which texts can be located on the basis of the quantity and the type of explicit interpersonal features they exhibit. In our study we focus on how certain clause-level and discourse-level thematic features contribute to the generic and registerial characterisation of news reports and commentaries in English and Spanish. In doing so, we hope to show that the choice of these thematic features is not random but reflects the rhetorical and communicative objectives that news reporters and commentators try to achieve with these texts.



3. Research questions The research questions investigated in this study are the following: 1. Is there any difference in the selection of thematic features between English and Spanish news reports, on the one hand, and commentaries, on the other? 2. If there is a difference, is it language-specific or does it reflect the communicative purposes of the two genres? These research questions are investigated by means of an empirical analysis of a comparable bilingual sample of news reports and commentaries, as described below. 4. Corpus data The data used for this study is a bilingual comparable English-Spanish corpus consisting of a total of thirty-two texts (sixteen news reports and sixteen commentaries) evenly divided into English and Spanish texts. The criteria for text comparability were both external and internal. External criteria included the year of publication and the type of publication. All the texts were collected from published sources between 2008 and 2009. As to the type of publication, the English news commentaries, written by expert writers or journalists, were extracted from the Project Syndicate, an international association of quality newspapers that publishes commentaries by prominent figures to the world’s foremost newspapers on topics ranging from economics and political and international affairs to science and philosophy. See The English news reports were extracted from the news section of the online version of the Times. The Spanish texts were all extracted from the news and opinion sections of El País digital , one of the Spanish high-circulation newspapers. As for the internal criteria for text comparability we used the categories of ‘genre’, the systemic-functional category of ‘register’ and the notion of ‘text type’ (Biber 1988). The sample collection procedure was as follows. 1. In order to ensure genre comparability of our bilingual sample, we used the classification provided by the CPCS Writing Portfolio of different newspaper genres.2 According to this classification, a news article or news report “should strive 2. This classification is available from the College of Public and Community Service of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Their web page can be consulted at



to remain objective and should use neutral language while presenting a diversity of opinions, voices, and perspectives of the event, incident, or issue under discussion.” A news commentary, just like an editorial or an op-ed, “presents the writer’s opinion on an issue of current public interest.” 2. In order to ensure register comparability, a modest register analysis was carried out to ensure the similarity of the English and the Spanish texts across the features of ‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’ (Butt et al. 2000: 5). With respect to ‘field’, all the texts collected dealt with economic matters, each bilingual pair of texts sharing the same ‘topic’. The ‘tenor’ of the texts involved similar participants with similar statuses and roles in the English and the Spanish texts. In the case of commentaries, the writer was, in most cases, a well-known politician, journalist or intellectual. The ‘mode’ includes features like the channel of communication which is written in both genres and monologic. In the case of news articles it may include occasional dialogic interventions. It also includes the rhetorical mode, or text type, according to Butt et al. The overall rhetorical mode is expository in news reports, while it is usually persuasive or argumentative in commentaries. As to the textual dimensions according to which texts can be classified into types (Biber 1988), news reports would be examples of informational production while commentaries would be examples of involved production. The bilingual sample collected is outlined in Appendix 1. It consists of a total of 32 texts, divided into two groups: 16 news reports (8 English and 8 Spanish) and 16 commentaries (8 English and 8 Spanish). The English sample consisted of a total of 404 clauses (10,288 words). The Spanish sample consisted of a total of 222 clauses (6,791 words). The texts are listed in Appendix 1. 5. Analysis methodology Our analysis focused on a number of clausal and discourse thematic features of the comparable English-Spanish sample. The analysis of the clausal thematic features was both qualitative and quantitative. The analysis of the discourse thematic features was only qualitative, given its exploratory nature. 5.1

Clausal thematic features

The analysis of the clausal thematic features focused on certain thematic categories proposed in Lavid et al.’s (2010) model of thematisation, which extends and reformulates the Systemic-Functional category of Theme, as studied by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004). In Lavid et al.’s model, the thematic structure of the clause is divided into two distinct functional zones or fields: the Thematic Field and the © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


Rhematic Field. The Thematic Field includes the clause-initial material from the beginning of the clause complex up to and including the first nuclear experiential constituent in the main clause. Within the Thematic Field it is possible to distinguish between the Inner Thematic Field (ITF), i.e. the nuclear Thematic Head and any possible PreHead material preceding it, and the Outer Thematic Field (OTF), i.e. elements which surround and complete the meaning of the ITF, usually realized by Interpersonal and Textual Themes. Table 1 illustrates this thematic structure in an English clause complex. Table 1. Thematic structure of an English clause complex THEMATIC FIELD OTF Indeed,

RHEMATIC FIELD

ITF Pre-Head

Head

since the civil war’s end in 2005

The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the South

has frequently had to confront militias that operate as government proxies.

Within the Inner Thematic Field our analysis focused on the Thematic Head, defined as the first nuclear experiential constituent within the main clause which is more central to the unfolding of the text by allowing the tracking of the discourse participants (Lavid et al. 2010). We analysed the following features of the Thematic Head: a. The experiential role of the Thematic Heads within the transitivity structure of the clause (see Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: Chapter 5). We recorded whether the Thematic Heads functioned as Actor, Goal, Sayer, Recipient, Senser, Phenomenon, Carrier, Attribute, etc. Examples (1), (2) and (3) below illustrate several cases of Thematic Head functioning as Carrier, Actor, and Sayer, respectively (Thematic Heads in boldface). (1) The negative stigma attached to IMF financing is a thing of the past. (The New IMF. Comment 8) (2) A high-powered Russian delegation recently arrived in Juba, the South Sudanese capital, with the proclaimed aim of “playing a more active role on the African continent.” (The Bigger Issue in Sudan. Comment 1) (3) Shakour Shaalan, the fund’s executive director, said 1MF staff, and notably female staff, “are not at all happy” with Mr Strauss-Kahn, whose amorous adventures in France have earned him the epithet le grand seducteur. (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, escapes dismissal over affair. Report 1) © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


b. The semantic nature of the noun group realizing the Thematic Head. We recorded whether the head of the group consisted of a concrete or an abstract entity. Concrete entities refer to human participants (e.g. Mr. Tiltman), titles (e.g. the managing director), pronouns (e.g. she, he, they), groups of people or institutions (e.g. the Government, Microsoft, etc.). Abstract entities refer to qualities or mental concepts (e.g. expectations, results, etc.). c. The internal complexity of the noun groups realizing the Thematic Head. Here we looked at whether the noun group functioning as Thematic Head was short or long, with varied and/or multiple heads or modifiers. Example (4) illustrates a complex noun group functioning as Thematic Head. It consists of a determiner (the), a head (agreement), and two postmodifiers: ‘by the American and Russian presidents’ and ‘to renew strategic arms reductions’: (4) The agreement by the American and Russian presidents to renew strategic arms reductions has revived hope for the global abolition of nuclear arms. (The Limits of Energy Innovation. Comment 3)

Within the Outer Thematic Field our analysis focused on Interpersonal Themes and Textual Themes. Interpersonal Themes are those elements which express the attitude and the evaluation of the speaker with respect to his/her message. These include vocatives, comment adjuncts and modal adjuncts, as illustrated by the elements in boldface in (5), (6) and (7) below: (5) John, come over here (6) Surprisingly, he didn’t mention anything (7) Probably that’s the only lesson we learned

Textual Themes are those elements which are instrumental in the creation of the logical connections in the text, such as linkers, binders and correlatives, as illustrated by the elements in boldface in (8), (9) and (10) below: (8) And don’t tell me you didn’t know (9) However, the situation now is different (10) Either you’re with us or you’re against us

5.2

Discourse thematic features

There are a number of ways to look at Theme from a discourse perspective. One of them is to consider the structure of the genres involved and how the different Themes help introduce or recognize the different moves or stages characterizing those genres. Alternatively, we can look at the method of development of © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


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 perspective, 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 qualitative 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.

Experiential roles of Thematic Heads 6.1.1 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 feature 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’ © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


(12) Tien-e más de 75 millones de clientes en Europa, [..] Have 3psgPres.Ind more than 75 million of customers in Europe ‘It has more than 75 million customers in Europe’

The second language-specific choice is the preferred conflation of the Goal/ Medium experiential roles with subject in English. While in English this is a frequent conflation which results in a passive structure, as in (13) below, in Spanish this conflation is less frequent (5.4% in English vs. 3.3% in Spanish), only occurring occasionally in this language, as illustrated in (14) below. (13) The investigation was launched when Mario Blejer, a senior Argentine economist, said Mrs Nagy, his wife, had been seduced at the Davos international forum. (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, escapes dismissal over affair. Report 1) (14) Esta cuota es determinada para cada país […]. (El FMI anuncia ayudas financieras para Ucrania y Hungría. Report 6) ‘This quota is determined by each country’

The rest of the conflations can be considered genre-related, reflecting the different communicative purposes which characterize news reports and commentaries. In this regard, our first observation was that the Actor was the preferred choice as Thematic head in both newspaper genres and in both languages (36.6% in English vs. 35.1% in Spanish), as illustrated by the elements in bold in Examples (15), (16), (17) and (18) below: (15) Emerging-market countries have increased their share of the world economy, giving them a more important voice in international relations. (Micro Europe. Comment 4) (16) El presidente de la Generalitat valenciana, Francisco Camps, compareció ayer como imputado ante el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunidad Valenciana, [..] (Sigue imputado. Comment 3) ‘The President of the Generalitat Valenciana, Francisco Camps, appeared yesterday as accused in the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community.’ (17) Dominique Strauss-Kam, the French head of the International Monetary Fund, escaped dismissal for a one-night stand with a subordinate today, but was denounced by board members for a “serious error of judgment”. (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, escapes dismissal over affair. Report 1) (18) La economía española caerá un 4% este año. ‘Spanish economy will fall 4% this year’

This is probably due to the fact that both genres deal with current events, which accounts for the high percentage of Material processes in both groups of texts. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


However, some genre-specific difference was also observed: in news reports, Sayer was the preferred choice as Thematic Head in English (25.4%), as illustrated in (19). This preference can be explained by the large number of citations introduced by verbal processes in news reports with the purpose of presenting a diversity of opinions, voices and perspectives on the event, incident or issue under discussion. This tendency is lower in Spanish (15.4%) where verbal processes are often postverbal, as in (20) below (Verbiage and Process functioning as Thematic Head are in bold), or implicit, as in (21). (19) Mr Bos said the deal was structured to ensure a state exit as soon as “this financial hurricane” receded. (Dutch Government to inject €10bn of fresh capital into ING savings bank. Report 4) (20) “Estamos preocupados por la reciente excesiva volatilidad en el tipo de cambio […] (El G7 reafirma su interés en que el sistema financiero sea “fuerte y estable”. Report 5) ‘We are concerned about the recent excessive volatility of the exchange rate’ (21) Rajoy ha apuntado a los “Torquemada del siglo XXI” como causantes de los problemas de Camps con la justicia. (Camps y Torquemada. Comment 8) ‘Rajoy has pointed the “Torquemada’s of the 21st Century” as the causers of Camps’ problems with Justice.

In commentaries, by contrast, the preferred choice was the Carrier in a relational process, both in Spanish (22.9%) and in English (35.4%). This can be interpreted as a textual device used by writers to give their opinion in what seems to be an objective and impartial way. By using relational structures writers of commentaries become invisible and manage to detach themselves from their opinions. For example, while a personally visible writer would use phrases like I propose…, the invisible writer would prefer It is clear that… Examples (22), (23), and (24) below illustrate this use: (22) After all, the oppressive nature of the regime in Khartoum is at the root of the many conflicts that have torn the country apart. (The Bigger Issue in Sudan. Comment 1) (23) The main expectations are for a reduction of nuclear armaments. (The Vanishing Bomb. Comment 2) (24) La tarea no era sencilla y la visita del líder israelí no ha arrojado avances. (Proyectos divergentes. Comment 4) ‘It was not an easy task and the Israeli leader’s visit has not rendered any improvement’


Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres

Thematic Heads functioning as Sensers in mental processes are rarely used in both languages (English 6.90%, Spanish 6.42%), but the analysis revealed a larger number of these items in commentaries with the function of introducing opinions, as in (25) and (26) below (Thematic Heads as Sensers in bold): (25) We appreciate the proposals from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany as well, while Russia also signaled recently in Geneva its readiness to embark upon nuclear disarmament. (The Vanishing Bomb. Comment 2) (26) El pasado 4 de octubre Holanda decidía así adquirir por 16.800 millones de euros los activos de esta entidad en su territorio. (Holanda inyectará 10.000 millones en el grupo ING. Report 4) ‘The last 4th October Holland decided to pay 16.800€ millions for the assets of this entity in its territory’

Existential processes are used only in English commentaries in a low percentage of the cases (6.90%), also to present an opinion, as illustrated in (27) and (28): (27) There is only one kind of primary energy (energy embodied in natural resources) that was not known to the first high civilizations of the Middle East and East Asia and by all of their pre-industrial successors: isotopes of the heavy elements whose nuclear fission has been used since the late 1950’s to generate heat that, in turn, produces steam for modern electricity turbogenerators. (The Limits of Energy Innovation. Comment 3) (28) There is also the risk that nuclear weapons may fall into the hands of non-state actors, such as terrorist groups. (The Vanishing Bomb. Comment 2)

6.1.2 The semantic nature of the noun groups realizing the Thematic Head The analysis revealed that noun groups are the most frequent realisation of Thematic Heads in both genres and languages (over 50%), as illustrated in (29): (29) The urgency can hardly be exaggerated: nuclear weapons may come into the possession of states that might use them, as well as of stateless terrorists – creating new threats of unimaginable proportion. (The Vanishing Bomb. Comment 2)

Genre-related differences were observed in the semantic nature of such Noun Groups. Thus, while news reports favoured the use of concrete nouns (63.69%) rather than abstract ones (14.46%), the opposite tendency was observed in commentaries, which showed a preference for the use of abstract nouns (40.10%) over concrete ones (30.90%). This difference proved to be statistically significant (p