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Article published In: Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 27:1 (2014) ► pp.87–117

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Discourse-organizational patterns in English and Spanish

Some notes on the thematic management of news reports

 | University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Published online: 8 August 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.27.1.04gom
Cast within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper sheds new light on the ‘thematic management’ of discourse and its interaction with ‘rhetorical management’ in particular, by exploring how the interplay between thematic structure and thematic progression is instantiated in a specific genre, news reports, in English and Spanish. The study shows that, even though there exist a number of differences that are language-determined, genre constraints seem to exert a greater influence because, generally speaking, English and Spanish news reports show greater similarities than differences.
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