Intercultural rhetoric: Use of the additive connectors in Spanish and Argentinian traffic-accident news

Abstract

Intercultural rhetoric: Use of the additive connectors in Spanish and Argentinian traffic- accident news. A review of the literature shows the great abundance of Intercultural Rhetoric studies carried out since the appearance of the discipline initial article (Kaplan, 1966). Many of these studies compares several features of the different genres between English and other languages -among them, Spanish- but there are few comparing Spanish to other languages. However, most of the research assumes that the results from the linguistic variant analyzed, for instance, Peninsular Spanish, can be extrapolated to the rest of the Spanish linguistic varieties without further ado. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to sustain that discourse communities using different linguistic varieties produces identical genres. This questioning has leaded to researches which compares the same genre among discourse communities belonging to different linguistic variants, that is, an Intracultural Rhetoric. However, these one are very scarce –in Spanish Pak and Acevedo (2008) only-. The current study tries to continue on this path, analyzing the use of additive and counter-argumentative connector in traffic accident news appeared in Spanish and Argentinian newspapers, showing their similarities and differences.