The introduction of topics in two discourse genres

This paper aims to study the sentence topic introductory strategies (van Dijk 1981a and b; Givon 1995; Dik 1989; and Downing 1991, 1998) in news items and tourist brochures. The original hypothesis for this research proposes that, because of the characteristics of genre and register of the two subgenres analysed, news items and tourist brochures will show significant differences in the linguistic resources used for topic introduction by the journalist and the brochure writer (Hengeveld 1997, Gomez-Gonzalez 2000, Moya and Albentosa 2001). The empirical analysis carried out reveals that introductory topics are activated in the two subgenres by significantly different linguistic resources. The persuasive function of the tourist brochure frequently leads the writer to use linguistic strategies by which s/he moves the new topical entities away from the thematic slot of the sentence. However, in the news items the local topics frequently initiate the sentence without further introduction. Following this pattern, the journalist facilitates the understanding of the message as the sentence topic is clearly activated from the outset.