Newsworthiness, attribution and lexicogrammatical strategies in two types of news articles in English and Spanish

Abstract

The contrastive analysis of two sets of newspaper articles has been carried out in order to observe how the reports of the same events are constructed in two different languages and cultures as represented by El País and The Guardian newspapers. The first set of texts consists of two science popularization articles dealing with the same scientific finding (Bee Texts), whereas the second set consists of all the articles covering the opening day of a world summit held in Rome (Summit Texts) which were published in the online versions of El País and The Guardian respectively. Newsworthiness (Bell, 1991), attribution and lexicogrammatical strategies have been studied in order to show how ideological construction has been developed in these two different kinds of report, one dealing with a non-controversial event (as represented in the Bee Texts) and the other with a controversial event (as represented in the Summit Texts).