What is it about?
This study examines four verbal features — tense, modal constructions, directive forms, and the passive voice — across two registers (promotional texts in the food and drink domain and essays on current topics) in both English and Spanish to investigate potential shared patterns of register variation. Using three corpora, a comparable corpus of promotional texts and two essay corpora, the analysis reveals apparent intra- and interlinguistic differences. Promotional texts in both languages favour the present tense and directive forms, while essays more often use the past tense and modal auxiliaries or periphrases. The passive voice is more frequent in English promotional texts than in Spanish. The findings suggest that shared verbal features may reflect universal patterns of variation across languages and registers.