Abstract
A corpus-based analysis was carried out with the aim of revealing dissimilarities in newspaper discourse in Spanish and English which can both reflect and be due to differences in the use of cultural patterns. For this purpose, two small corpora consisting of the news articles covering an event of global importance were compiled. This event was the world food summit organized by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the corpora cover all the texts which were published on the opening day of the summit (3 June 2008). One corpus consists of all the articles appearing in the electronic version of El País newspaper and the other contains all the articles from the electronic version of the Guardian.
In order to compare the two corpora, a qualitative-quantitative analysis adapted from O’Halloran (2007, 2009) was carried out using corpus linguistics methodology and discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that newsworthiness (Bell, 1991) is higher in El País than in the Guardian and that each newspaper aligns itself crucially with different participants. These results show how each newspaper has constructed its own agenda of the summit so that each readership is offered a different account and, therefore, is positioned in a different way in each case.