A corpus study of impersonalisation strategies in newspaper discourse in English and Spanish

Strategies of impersonalisation in English and Spanish include the use of passives, resultatives, anticausatives, impersonal constructions, nominalizations, and various forms of lexical underspecification (Nedjalkov 1988, Shibatani 1988, Gómez Torrego 1992, Fox and Hopper 1994, Mendikoetxea 1999). The use of these strategies in newspaper discourse reporting political events reflect issues in language and ideology, such as the intentional mystification of agency and vagueness of responsability in discourse (Fairclough 1989, Fowler 1991, Gruber 1993, Curran and Seaton 1997, van Dijk 1998). This paper reports on on-going research as part of a major project on the use of these strategies in British and Spanish newspaper articles on political issues. In the collection of texts, we have established a gradient, from those news reports where neither Britain nor Spain is alluded to or implicated, to a situation where each country is both mentioned and implicated in the event. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) the identification of qualitative and quantitative differences in the use of impersonalisation strategies between the two languages , i.e. whether the same type of strategies are used in the two languages and the extent to which they are used; and (2) the correlation between the use of strategies and the degree of implication which the newspaper articles reflect in both languages.