Unveiling the writer–reader interaction in Peninsular Spanish and American English newspaper editorials: A cross linguistic study  

Oleh:

Maddalena, Antonello

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 43 no. 03 (2011), page 891–903.
Topik: Newspaper editorials Peninsular Spanish American English Writer’s responsibility Rhetorical relations Written argumentative discourse
Fulltext: Maddalena_A.pdf (180.34KB)

Isi artikel

The present study attempts to demonstrate that in persuasive journalistic writing, the proportion in the use of superordinate and ancillary rhetorical roles, or nuclei and satellites, adopting the terminology proposed by Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), is a viable indicator to assess what kind of relationship the writer sets out to establish with his/her readership. To this aim, a revisited version of Tirkkonen- Condit’s method of textual description (1985), specifically created to unravel the inner workings of argumentative texts, was applied for the scrutiny of two comparable corpora of American English and Peninsular Spanish leading articles. Rhetorical relations holding between sentences of each text and text spans were spelled out and then categorised as nuclei and satellites. Findings reveal a tendency for the American English editorials analyzed to be more writer-responsible than Peninsular Spanish ones. In other words, while in American English leading articles the reader’s belief, comprehension or adherence to the thesis presented is not taken for granted, hence the need, on the part of the writer, to justify, explain, exemplify and reformulate; in Peninsular Spanish leading articles, a minor presence of ancillary rhetorical relations is understood as an illustration of less audiencesensitive writing. Data are discussed in relation to the respective socio-cultural contexts in which sample texts were written.

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