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Part of
Discourse Studies in Public Communication
Edited by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 92] 2021
► pp. 83–102

Chapter 4
A corpus-assisted qualitative approach to political discourse in Spanish print and digital press

ORCID logo | Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Lingüística Aplicada (ILA), Universidad de Cádiz , Spain

News discourse nowadays is generally regarded as a means for the transmission of ideology and other predefined ideas, usually related to political viewpoints and, therefore, political discourses. From this standpoint (widely discussed by van Dijk, Fairclough, and Wodak, among others), I intend to achieve an adequate qualitative description of conceptual networks and some general patterns of persuasive communicative goals throughout data obtained from written pieces of discourse in Spanish media, focusing my attention on a series of key words, frequently used by politicians and reproduced by the media, previously gathered from Spanish main parties’ electoral programs. My assumption is that, being involved with political ideology, patterns found within news discourse support the idea that a positive or a negative position is defended regarding those contents represented by said key words.

Keywords: news discourse, ideology, polarisation, political discourse, political key words
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: Discourse analysis, pragmatics, and lexical semantics
  • 3.Methodological aspects
  • 3.Findings and results: News discourse as a means for spreading ideology
    • 3.1Previous selection of key words in political discourse
    • 3.2Quantitative analysis of key words in news discourse
    • 3.3Qualitative approach: The interpretation of lexical selections within news discourse
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 7 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.92.04fer
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