Discourse-organizational patterns in English and Spanish: Some notes on the thematic management of news reports

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.