Intersubjective positioning and thematisation in English and Spanish: a contrastive analysis of letters to the editor

ABSTRACT: This paper examines how writers of Letters to the editor exploit thematisation to project themselves into their discourse and to engage their audience in the English and the Spanish discourse communities. Using a bilingual comparable corpus of a total of eighty letters (forty English and f...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Lavid López, María Julia, Moratón Gutiérrez, Lara
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/108611
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/108611
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:070
070.431
811.134.2
81'4
Filología inglesa
Lingüística
Periodismo
5701 Lingüística Aplicada
5505.10 Filología
Descripción
Sumario:ABSTRACT: This paper examines how writers of Letters to the editor exploit thematisation to project themselves into their discourse and to engage their audience in the English and the Spanish discourse communities. Using a bilingual comparable corpus of a total of eighty letters (forty English and forty Spanish) for analysis and a bilingual corpus of fifty newspaper reports and fifty editorials from British and Spanish newspapers for crossgenre comparison, we analyse the distribution of Stance and Engagement expressions in thematic position and the preferred thematic types conflating with these expressions in both languages. The analysis reveals a number of specific preferences in the use of those expressions, which sheds light on the features of Letters to the editor in English and Spanish. It also reveals that despite the broadly similar audience and sources of the three newspaper genres, authors structure their interactions very differently, contributing to their rhetorical distinctiveness.