Epistemic and effective stance in Spanish conservative newspaper and political discourse on immigration and refugees

Epistemic and effective stance in Spanish conservative newspaper and political discourse on immigration and refugees

This study sets forth an analysis of epistemic and effective stance realizations in two 120,000-word Spanish corpora. The first consists of opinion articles from conservative newspapers (El Mundo, La Razón, Libertad Digital, La Gaceta and OK Diario), and the second contains transcribed political spoken discourse from members of two conservative parties, Partido Popular (centre-right) and Vox (right). Both corpora are evenly divided into discourse concerning illegal immigration and discourse about three humanitarian crises involving refugees: Syria 2015, Afghanistan 2021 and Ukraine 2022-. Drawing from findings of previous research (Carretero, 2023; Marín-Arrese, 2021; Domínguez Romero & Martín de la Rosa, 2023; Mora-López & Ferrer-Navas, 2023), this study aims to (dis)confirm the following hypotheses:

1. The newspaper corpus will contain more occurrences of epistemic stance, while the political corpus will be richer in expressions of effective stance. In other words, the stance expressions in the newspaper discourse will be comparably more inclined towards assessing the validity of information and less inclined to try to influence the course of reality.
2. The political corpus will display more expressions of epistemic stance of the ‘personal’ subtypes, i.e. those that explicitly mention the speaker or writer (and others) as conceptualizer of epistemicity (yo) sé ‘I know’, (nosotros) sabemos ‘we know’, (yo) creo ‘I think’ or me parece ‘it seems to me’, among others.
3. Differences will be found between discourse on illegal immigration and discourse on the humanitarian crises. For political and ethnic reasons, these dissimilarities will predictably be smaller for the Syria 2015 crisis.

The hypotheses will be (dis)confirmed through a quantitative analysis of epistemic and effective stance on the corpora, combining manual and automatic annotation procedures. The results will also enable the detection of more specific similarities and differences in the stance expressions most frequently employed in each of the two corpora.

References

Carretero, M. (2023). Knowledge and belief in the times of COVID-19: A comparative analysis of epistemicity in English newspaper discourse of two stages of the pandemic. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 3(2), 100054.

Domínguez Romero, E., & Martín de la Rosa, V. (2023). Epistemic stance in opinion newspaper articles and political speeches: An English/Spanish contrastive approach. In Stance, Inter/Subjectivity and Identity in Discourse (pp. 75-99). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Marín-Arrese, J. I. (2021). Stance, emotion and persuasion: Terrorism and the Press. Journal of Pragmatics, 177, 135-148.

Mora-López, N., & Ferrer-Navas, S. (2023). An English-Spanish contrastive analysis of effective stance in newspaper and political discourse. In Stance, Inter/Subjectivity and Identity in Discourse (pp. 57-74). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.