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A Cross-cultural Analysis of English Newspaper Editorials

A Systemic-Functional View of Text for Contrastive Rhetoric Research

Hasan Ansary

Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran ansary2877{at}yahoo.com

Esmat Babaii

University for Teacher Education, Tehran, Iran babaii{at}saba.tmu.ac.ir

{blacksquare} It is true that analyses of English language texts dominate the literature. It is equally true that a flourishing field of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address the way various text types and/or genres may differ across cultures and languages (see Connor 1996, 2003). Very much in line with these developments, this study was an attempt to first characterize the global and/or macro-rhetorical structure of English newspaper editorials and formulate what Halliday and Hasan (1989: 64) call `the Generic Structure Potential' (GSP) of a genre. Secondly, this study attempted to cross-examine whether there is significant macro-structural variation from one culture to another within the same genre. To this end, a total of 90 editorials culled from three English newspapers (30 editorials each) published in three different socio-cultural environments by native speakers of English (The Washington Times), and non-native speakers (The Iran News, and The Pakistan Today) were text-analyzed. The results of a GSP analysis of texts indicated that, in terms of the rhetorical elements of structure, there is `statistically' no significant difference ({alpha} = .05) between editorials written by (non-)native editorial writers, in whatever socio-cultural and socio-political context they are produced and disseminated. In plain words, results revealed that an `unmarked' English newspaper editorial, published either in Iran or Pakistan or the USA, typically consists of four obligatory and two optional generic rhetorical elements.

Key Words: Contrastive Rhetoric • English Newspaper Editorials • Generic Structure Potential • GSP • Systemic Functional Theory.

RELC Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, 211-249 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0033688209105867
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