Towards intracultural rhetoric: the use of the additive connectors in traffic accident news in Spanish and Mexican newspapers

Abstract

A review of the literature shows the great abundance of contrastive rhetoric studies carried out since the appearance of the discipline initial article (Kaplan, 1966). Many of these studies compares several features—structures, content…—of the different genres between English and other languages—among them, Spanish—but there are few comparing Spanish to other languages. However, most of the research assumes that the results from the linguistic variant analyzed, for instance, peninsular Spanish, can be extrapolated to the rest of the Spanish linguistic varieties without further ado. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to sustain that discourse communities using different linguistic varieties produce identical genres. This questioning has leaded to researches which compares the same genre among discourse communities belonging to different linguistic variants, that is, an intracultural rhetoric. However, there a few studies—Ädel (2008), Pak y Acevedo (2008)—comparing different linguistic variants from the same language. In the current study we continue on this path, analyzing the use of additive connectors in traffic accident news appeared in Spanish and Mexican newspapers, showing their similarities and differences: the connectors used, their functions and their frequency. The results show that, in spite of using almost the same connectors with a similar frequency index, generally speaking, as for their use in the news, they have significant divergences.