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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the clausal thematic features observed in two newspaper genres —news reports and commentaries— can be interpreted as textual signals of their different generic characterization. This is done through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a sample consisting of thirty-three English texts, divided into two groups of seventeen news reports and sixteen commentaries, respectively. The analysis focused on the following thematic features: (1) the experiential elements selected as Thematic Heads; (2) the semantic nature of the nominal elements realizing these Heads and their internal structure; (3) the textual and interpersonal thematic choices as part of a multiple theme. The analysis reveals that each newspaper genre prefers certain thematic features and that the differences between the two genres are statistically significant. It is suggested that these thematic preferences can be attributed to genre-related variables such as the communicative purpose or the subject matter of the text

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In this paper we present the preliminary results of an empirical study designed to test contrastive features of the category of Theme in English and Spanish through corpus analysis and manual annotation. Using as our theoretical basis the more general features of the model of thematisation proposed in Lavid, Arús and Zamorano (2010), the study describes the different steps of the methodology used, starting with the selection of the corpus used as a ‘training suite’, followed by the design of the annotation scheme, and ending with a discussion of the results of two annotation experiments carried out so far to test the reproducibility of the annotation scheme. It is expected that the work reported in this paper has a theoretical impact on the area of contrastive corpus studies and serves as the basis for the (semi)-automatic annotation of thematic features in larger bilingual corpora.