A Cross-cultural Analysis of English Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

■ 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 (α = .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.