Spanish politicians in Twitter: A linguistic analysis of their written discourse

Abstract

In Spain, politics is often seen as a profession rather than a service, and thus political discourse should be considered a specialized genre subjected to specific rules and convention. In the 2010s, a new tendency to campaign in politics was the use of social networks, allowing the publication of messages in a virtual environment and the possibility of interacting with other users, Twitter being a popular network. The purpose of this research is to analyze a corpus of 630 tweets published by four Spanish political leaders in their personal Twitter accounts, and consequently to describe their communication style in this social network with the hypothesis that their political views and interests influence their messages. In order to achieve our aim, this research focused on the analysis of written text, emoji, multimedia affordances, and hashtags, and how these elements influenced the politicians’ communication style when dealing with some relevant topics at the time this study was carried out.

Keywords

• written discourse
• spanish politicians
• social networks
• twitter
• communication