330 | nº 31, pp. 315-340 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
Analysis of the discursive framing strategies used in Spanish press headlines regarding the electoral coverage...
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
illocutionary speech, which refers to the type of action that the sender intends to carry out by means of his or her message; propositional speech, as evidenced by the lexical selection; and “actantiality”, which is associated with the distribution of the action and its responsibility in the extra-verbal field.
In [Image 5] we present the quantitative results of the analysis of the speaker’s intention in the texts that comprise our corpus:
Image 5. Types of illocutivity present in the different newspapers
Source: prepared by the authors
In all the newspapers analysed, there is a clear predominance of representative illocutivity (with percentages between 89.7 % and 59.5 %), as they provide information with truth value:
[Ex. 43]. The judge releases the four people arrested in the incidents following the Vox rally yesterday in Bilbao (El Diario, 14/04/2019)
[Ex. 44]. Vox collects 50,000 signatures to endorse its European list (El País, 22/04/2019)
Sometimes this value is even ascribed to what are in fact mere predictions, and at times the source is not even mentioned:
[Ex. 45]. Abascal “surpasses” Podemos and is close to being a threat to Ciudadanos (ABC, 20/04/2019)
For example, it is not possible to know until the second paragraph of the news that the statement in the previous headline is a speculation on the voting intentions of Spanish citizens based on a survey carried out on behalf of ABC by the GAD3 polling firm on 16 April 2019
At times, truth value becomes obvious, as in the following headline in which El Confidencial uses the epistemic technique to “advertise” an exclusive story, highlighting the degree of certainty of the proposition contained in its headline and, at