TOWARDS THE CHARACTERISATION OF A SPECIFIC TEXT TYPE: THE DIMENSION OF INTERSENTENTIAL RELATIONS IN EDITORIALS FROM EL PAÍS.

This paper offers a programmatic proposal for the characterisation, or profiling, of editorials from the Spanish newspaper El País on the dimension of the explicit signalling of intersentential relations for purposes of comparison. The study adopts an integrated discourse as process approach to the description of language, in conjunction with some of the basic tenets of corpus linguistics. The paper advocates strict specificity and differentiation of text types in such studies and a rigorous respect for the intrasentential, the intersentential and the interparagraph segmentation which authors impose on their texts. Figures are offered for the frequency of selected connectors in a corpus of one whole year of editorials from this newspaper, together with information relating to their sentence and paragraph position. Additional consideration is given to important alternative means for the expression of intersentential relations and to questions related to corpus extent in studies of this nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]