The concept of change in political discourse on Twitter: the case of Ciudadanos during the 2016 general election

Abstract

Spanish political discourse has already been studied in numerous investigations from different linguistic perspectives, but it continues to be an area that arouses interest among linguists. Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze the political discourse carried out by the Spanish party Ciudadanos on Twitter. In particular, we aim to find out how some of the linguistic argumentation mechanisms were used before the 2016 General Elections in Spain. Specifically, we will focus on analyzing evaluative language, operators, and argumentative connectors, considering the concepts of argumentation theory in language (Anscombre and Ducrot, 1994; Portolés 1998, 2001, 2004; Fuentes Rodríguez and Alcaide Lara, 2007) and the typology of axiological language (Puzynina 1992).