Towards the characterisation of a specific text type: the dimension of sentential phraseological units in editorials from El País

Abstract

This paper offers an account of sentential phraseological units (SPU's) as they appear in editorials from the Spanish newspaper El País. The corpus comprises 3 entire years of editorials from the newspaper (2002-2004), with a total of approximately 2900 individual texts and 1.34 million words. Details are provided of the frequency of the SPU's in the corpus, the internal and external modification of such expressions, their contribution to discourse organisation, the presence of metalinguistic devices, and so on. The study advocates strict text-type specificity for such descriptions in order to avoid nondifferentiated generalisation across disparate text types, together with the use of extensive corpora. The ultimate aim of the research is to explore the possibility of providing a profile for editorials from El País on the dimension of the characteristics of SPU's so that empirical comparisons can be established between different text types both on the intralinguistic and interlinguistic planes.

Key words: Text types, newspaper editorials, sentential phraseological units, corpus analysis.