Monografico_5_EN_Doxa_31_Analysis_of_the_discursive

the same time, implicitly challenging one of the arguments put forward by Pedro Sánchez during the electoral debate held the night before:

[Ex. 46]. The truth behind the letter regarding gender-based violence: it is not from Vox and no data has been provided (El Confidencial, 24/04/2019)

In the course of the debate, the socialist candidate had shown a letter in which the Andalusian regional government allegedly requested data from a worker in the gender violence units in Sevilla. This was displayed by Pedro Sánchez as proof that the government of this autonomous region (headed by the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, as we explained previously) was following Vox’s orders, due to the fact that in February of 2019 Santiago Abascal’s party questioned the professionalism of the members of the gender violence units, alleging that these units were “ideological beach bars” and, through the Board of the Andalusian Parliament, Vox requested that the details of their workers be made public. However, the headline of El Confidencial announced an investigation that would be carried out by the newspaper itself in which the veracity of such argumentation was questioned. Enguix Oliver and Gallardo Paúls (2020, in press) made the following observations:

The intentional strategy, predominantly representative, is associated above all with the structural approach of informative genres (news, reports, chronicles), while that which is predominantly expressive is more often related to opinion genres (columns and editorials).

Nevertheless, although the headlines of our corpus are exclusively texts corresponding to informative genres, we have been able to identify many examples in which negative expressiveness prevails. This is especially true of El Confidencial and El Mundo, which account for 36.0% and 35.7%, respectively:

[Ex. 47]. Vox gives up on Facebook, because it is the only party that no longer pays to advertise itself (El Confidencial, 23/04/2019)

[Ex. 48]. Right-wing turmoil: the 1+1+1 vote in the Senate; the dissemination of messages calling for the division of the vote between PP, Ciudadanos and Vox generates doubts among voters (El Mundo, 25/04/2019)

According to la Real Academia Española (the Spanish Royal Academy) (RAE) (2014), tirar la toalla means “to give up, or abandon an endeavour. Therefore, the pre-eminence of the axiological modality can be observed in this headline, since El Confidencial uses this colloquial verbal expression to make a negative assessment of the campaign strategy adopted by Vox on Facebook. Such polarity can also be attributed to the nominal syntagma, “right-wing turmoil”, with which El Mundo summarises and values the information presented below. These two media are joined by El Diario and El País, with high percentages of negative expressiveness at 34.1% and 30%, respectively.

Positive expressiveness is especially evident in OK Diario (with a figure of 5.7%) where this type of headline was published in which the augmentative suffix and the adjective “total” add value to the information about the large number of people attending Vox rallies:

[Ex. 49]. Santiago Abascal’s full house in Albacete: “VOX doesn’t call for the left or right, but for all of Spain” (OK Diario, 20/04/2019)