Epistemic and Effective Stance in Spanish Conservative Newspaper and Political Discourseon Immigration and Refugees
Abstract
This study presents a quantitative, contrastive analysis of epistemic and effective stance in two Spanish corpora of approximately 215,000 words. The first corpus comprises opinion articles from conservative newspapers (El Mundo, La Razón, Libertad Digital, La Gaceta, OK Diario), while the second contains transcribed political discourse from members of Partido Popular and Vox. Both corpora are evenly divided between discourse on irregular immigration and three refugee crises: Syria (2015), Afghanistan (2021), and Ukraine (2022–). Stance expressions were annotated using a combined manual and automatic method. Results reveal quantitative differences in effective stance across subcorpora, while epistemic stance remains relatively stable. Additional findings include the overuse of personal expressions in political discourse, explicitly marking the speaker/writer as stance conceptualiser, and the underuse of both stance types in Vox discourse. These patterns suggest a more assertive style in Vox, privileging statements of fact over evaluative positioning.
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