A Cross-cultural Analysis of English Newspaper Editorials: A Systemic-Functional View of Text for Contrastive Rhetoric Research

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.