Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación

The Communicative Linguistic Landscape. Production formats and designed environments, by Lionel Wee, New York: Routledge, 2021, 186 pp., ISBN: 9780367701031

Yufan Zhao — 2025-11-14

Strategic epistemicity in women’s (writen) discourse

María Amparo Soler Bonafont — 2025-11-14

The main purpose of this paper is to review the use of epistemicity in short texts in Spanish written by women in light of the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Through a study of a diachronic corpus (comprised of samples of interactive genres from the 17th to the 21st centuries), the research describes how women’s identity narrative —that is, the feminolect of recent centuries— has been configured, focusing on the strategic use of modality.

Political discourse in the digital age Speeches in foreign parliaments of the president of Ukraine Volodimir Zelenski

Palma Peña Jiménez — 2025-11-14

Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, President Volodimir Zelensky has developed an enormous discursive activity that has contributed to neutralizing the defeatist narrative of Russian propaganda regarding the evolution of the military campaign on Ukrainian soil. In this article we analyze president Zelensky’s speeches in numerous parliaments around the world. The results show that both the context and the affective or emotional nature of the speeches are determining aspects for the achievement of objectives in political discourse. Some conclusions are drawn from the case study. Among them: 1) the validity of political discourse as a tool capable of provoking concrete responses planned by the speaker in the audience; 2) its effectiveness as a propaganda tool, exponentially amplified in the digital age; 3) the diplomatic and formal character of its language, as well as some intentional notes of closeness and universality, necessary to connect with the majority; and, lastly, 4) its complex nature (identity of the speaker, context, transmission channel, etc.) and, consequently, the thorough approach that its analysis requires.

Discourses of loss of professional status and gender discrimination among migrant physicians in Chile

Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar — 2025-11-14

Cultural transitions are sites of identity struggle since professionals often need to revise their disciplinary values and ideologies, their professional identity stance and claims and their professional practices in the light of the beliefs and expectations of their peers in the host culture. Drawing on data from sociolinguistic interviews, this study explores the role and discursive construction of professional identity in discourses of status loss and gender discrimination of migrant physicians who have faced challenges that not only damaged their professional image but also constrained their ability to practice medicine during their cultural transition in public hospitals in Chile. Adopting an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, the study discusses how related disempowering actions may affect migrant physicians’ self-esteem and how some employ their professional identity as a resource to cope whenever their integrity as people and as professionals is threatened by discriminatory behaviour and/or their loss of professional status.

Towards a methodology for voice quality analysis and character coherence in dubbing

Alfonso Carlos Rodríguez Fernández-Peña — 2025-11-14

This paper presents a methodology for voice quality analysis in dubbing and other audiovisual translation modes that include revoicing. The degree of correspondence between source and target voices, namely character coherence, is of utmost importance in audiovisual translation if we are to deliver a faithful translation and avoid unnecessary stereotypical cliches that could lead the audience to biased narrative. Although a few attempts at analysing voice quality have been done in audiovisual translation (Bosseaux 2015, 2018, Rodríguez Fernández-Peña 2020), we believe the methodologies proposed are incomplete since fundamental elements, such as the phonation types, voice group and the fundamental frequency range are not included. Here, we will present a methodology that complements the ones suggested by the scholarly tradition and which offers a comprehensive analysis of the actors’ voice qualities resorting to the speech analysis software Praat, and which is explained in the analysis of Hollywood voices offered at the end. Voice quality and identity constructions will be considered taking into account disciplines such as psychology, phonetics and phonology, audiology, and musicology. In addition, we will present the different types of phonation according to the most relevant researchers, which, together with other physical elements, are fundamental in order to analyse voice quality and their communicative value.

Unpacking the Discursive Construction of Air Pollution in Official Chinese English-language Press: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of China Daily News Reports (2016-2022)

Guangyuan Yao — 2025-11-14

China has been grappling with an air pollution crisis for several years, causing significant impacts on public health and the environment. As the official English-language publication in China, China Daily serves as an essential medium for disseminating the Chinese government's messaging to the international community regarding environmental governance and policy. This study aims to examine the discourse on air pollution in the official English-language newspaper, China Daily, between 2016 and 2022. The research seeks to answer questions about how China Daily constructs the discourse on pollution, how it shapes public perception of China's environmental governance, and what sociopolitical factors influence China's response to environmental challenges. The study suggests that China's commitment to addressing environmental issues through policy measures and sound governance offers a promising outlook for a cleaner and sustainable future.

Uses of approximators como (que) and com (que) in Spanish and Catalan amongst young bilinguals in improvised TV

Natàlia Server Benetó — 2025-11-14

Numerous studies in different sociolinguistic contexts of Spanish have been interested in the approximant markers como and como que (Jørgensen 2012; Panussis & San Martín 2017; Mondaca Becerra 2019). There is no study on their equivalent Catalan forms, com and com que. In here, I analyze the uses of como and como que in a yet unexamined variety of Spanish: young bilinguals in Catalan and Spanish in the specific context of improvised TV. In addition, the corresponding forms in Catalan com and com que are analyzed for the first time, albeit to a lesser extent. The corpus of analysis is the streaming series ‘Autodefensa’, whose dialogues are generally improvised, which directly affects the (non)use of these markers, indicators of a language of immediacy (Koch & Oesterreicher 2012[1985]). In this regard, performativity seems to be a relevant factor in the meaning(s) and use(s) of the markers. The results point to a preference in both languages for com(o) and its attenuating function. Furthermore, an initial analysis of two possibly emerging new forms in Spanish and Catalan is presented: como de and com de. Finally, some cooccurrences of the como makers and others associated with youth language, as rollo and o sea, are also discussed (Costa Otero 2021).

New avenues for disambiguation within noun phrases in German: methodological-linguistic foundations for the development of a (semi)automatic semantic annotation tool

Iván Arias-Arias — 2025-11-14

The present research aims to present some initial proposals for a (semi)automatic tool for ontological annotation of German linguistic corpora. The focus is on the analysis of nominal argument structures within the semantic field of expression, in order to assess the feasibility of the proposed model. To this end, a detailed description of the methodology used will be provided, some preliminary results will be presented and further avenues for the development of a potential tool will be suggested.

Construction of the masculinity and femininity of athletes in the Spanish sports press from an approach of Critical Discourse Analysis

Juana Salido-Fernández — 2025-11-14

This paper studies how the news about women's and men's Olympic sports are constructed in the Spanish sports press to reveal whether linguistic strategies are used to build the female and male athletic identity in a differentiated way. The methodology used is the Critical Discourse Analysis with a feminist perspective (ACDF) with the study of N=17661 units of analysis from a total of 39 news items published in the digital edition of the Spanish sports newspapers with the greatest coverage (Marca, As, Mundo Deportivo and Sport). The results reveal differences in the lexical choices for each sex, with double the verbal citation in masculine news, especially neutral compared to the greater presence of expressive verbs for women, who are shown with a more passive expression of transitivity compared to more male active. The identification and representation of the protagonists reveals almost twice as many formal lexical choices for men and three times as many informal ones for women, greater masculine nominalization, functionalization, and overlexication, as well as more than twice as many rhetorical resources and honorific uses used to magnify their figure and achievements. In short, a lesser relevance of the female voice is perpetuated, which is shown as more emotional, passive, close and informal compared to a more active and neutral male voice, with more exaltation of their achievements and figure. A greater and better balance in the lexical choices made by these media can contribute to a transformation of the normalized ideas in relation to sport.

The subjunctive in Spanish and Chinese. A case study of conditional sentences

Jiehui Zu — 2025-11-14

Based on the universality of the value of the subjunctive, this article presents a contrastive analysis of this category in the conditional clause in Spanish and Chinese. The study has been carried out through the revision of the related bibliography and, specially, through a parallel corpus which is made up of two literary works: La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2016), and Hei¹an⁴sen¹lin² by Liu Cixin (2008), as well as the Chinese and Spanish translations. After research, we have shown that semantically, both in Spanish and Chinese the subjunctive is related to possible, impossible, unrealized, unverified, counterfactual, etc.; from the grammatical perspective, in Spanish it’s expressed through a series of systemic and morphological marks, while in Chinese, by multiple forms such as hypothetical conjunctions or particles, modal verbs, negative constructions, which do not constitute a closed paradigm.

Comparative study of the treatment of news on “everyday” politics in the Spanish press

Gloria Vázquez García — 2025-11-14

This paper presents the results of the analysis of 7 news items published in 2018 by 3 Spanish newspapers (21 texts). These three newspapers are associated with different ideological tendencies and have barely been studied from a linguistic perspective. The main aim of this research is to check whether the results of our study which, as a novelty, is based on “everyday” political news, corroborate such bias. For this purpose, the techniques used have not only been qualitative, rooted in discourse analysis, but also quantitative. From a quantitative perspective, the length of the articles, the number of quotes and the percentage of both similar and different lemmas have been studied. Regarding the qualitative analysis, we have dealt with issues related to focus, lexical semantic connotations, and the degree of discourse complexity. The results of both analyses are along the same lines and allow us to corroborate, albeit with nuances, the tendency associated with the media studied.

Las oraciones exclamativas indirectas

Raquel González Rodríguez — 2025-11-14

Las oraciones exclamativas, tanto las directas como las indirectas, han recibido menor atención que las interrogativas correspondientes. El objetivo de este trabajo es demostrar, por un lado, que ambas construcciones han de considerarse como independientes la una de la otra; es decir, vamos a probar, en primer lugar, que las oraciones exclamativas tienen una morfosintaxis y una semántica diferente de las interrogativas y, por ello, no tiene sentido, como se ha hecho a veces en la bibliografía, intentar derivar la semántica de las exclamativas de la de las interrogativas. Por el otro lado, el trabajo pretende aportar datos empíricos nuevos que demuestran que ciertas supuestas diferencias entre las exclamativas directas y las indirectas no son tales.

The radicalisation process of the 17-A terrorist cell, or how extremism can leave its mark on language

Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio — 2025-11-14

In August 2017, a group of young people from Ripoll, known as the 17-A cell, carried out two terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Spain, resulting in the deaths of 16 people and leaving over a hundred injured. In an attempt to understand what happened and, more importantly, how it came to be, this research explores the verbal conduct of this terrorist cell through the texts found on their computers and mobile devices. Adopting a corpus-based discourse analysis perspective, our primary objective is to determine the discursive characteristics of these individuals. Our interest lies not only in what they say, to whom they address, who they speak about, and what reactions can be inferred, but also, and especially, in how they express themselves. Here, we present the results of an initially inductive approach to the data. To gain an overview of the materials self-produced by the cell, we have utilised one of the essential tools in corpus linguistics: keyword analysis; the later has been applied to various forms of communication, including audio files, short messages and WhatsApp conversations.

Metadiscursive functions of conceptual metaphor in guided meditation

Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando — 2025-11-14

Metadiscourse focuses on the interactional dimension of communication, what Sinclair (1981) called the 'interactive plane', and the coherence of interpersonal resources used to organise discourse (Hyland, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010). In this vein, we have analysed a corpus of recorded guided meditations from lay and religious meditation contexts. We have searched for explicit signals instantiating metaphors that guide the meditation practice by marking successive genre stages. The Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) (Steen et al., 2010) is applied to identify this type of meta-discursive mark. Three types of guided meditation are compared for the signalled metaphors used to guide meditative practice and their functions. The results show that metaphor signalling plays an ostensive communicative function in organising the text contents and serving the purpose of both maintaining the audience's attention and achieving their comprehension of the mental processes they are involved in during the meditative practice. The conclusions suggest a view of metaphor usage as a metadiscursive mechanism conveying non-denotational meaning and a clue factor in meditation discourse.

Subaltern groups and linguistic prejudice in the media. An introduction

Teresa Fernández-Ulloa — 2025-11-14

The representation of subaltern groups in the media is governed by stereotyping, which only perpetuates social hierarchies and limits agency.

These subaltern groups, marginalized by race, gender, religion, or socioeconomic status, face linguistic prejudice, which is evident both in the terminology and in the biased representation made of them, for example, dehumanizing immigrants, presenting racial minorities in contexts of dependency, stereotyping LGBTQ+ people and religious minorities or victimizing women, which overshadows their strengths and contributions to society.

Inclusive and accurate media representation is crucial to challenging these biases, dismantling stereotypes, and promoting equity in societal narratives.

To be someone is never to be no one: Nador and migratory narratives in the Spanish context

Carmen Ainoa Martínez Cuervo — 2025-11-14

In recent decades, Spanish media have frequently covered migration movements to European territory from the northern coast of Africa in the areas of Ceuta and Melilla. A recent incident involving migrants in Nador (a region located near the Melilla border fence) provides an example of how the press plays an important role in building narratives and imaginaries about migrants. This study examines how the media portrays the figure of the al-Hrig migrant in the media coverage of this incident. Analyses of two reports appearing in the national media ABC and Newtral will be conducted. This study examines how the events in Melilla highlight the tensions surrounding citizenship in the current border context and how they are enacted through the concept of transnational violence. The aim is to apply the theoretical framework developed by Balibar (2013) and Mouffe (2012), with a specific emphasis on the media's role in shaping narratives about migrants and its profound impact on public perception and migration policies.

Demonisation and hate speech in the media: contrast between Donald Trump's anti-immigration speech and Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic rhetoric

Alicia Mariscal Ríos — 2025-11-14

Despite the progress that mass media have brought to society, they may also be used as an instrument to spread prejudices and negative attitudes towards certain groups of people, as in the case of immigrants. This distorted perception of reality is achieved, for example, by means of narratives against them. On 16 December 2023, during the electoral campaign to the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump accused immigrants of being “poisoning the blood of the country”, which was associated with the Nazi rhetoric employed by Adolf Hitler (1925) in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), where he described Jews as someone who poisoned others’ blood. In this study, it is hypothesised that, along with the “contamination” of blood, more similarities will be observed in the anti-Semitic and anti-immigration discourses delivered by both political leaders, to increase otherness and hatred towards the groups involved, with topics such as those described by Marcus (2022), Wodak (2001), Reisigl & Wodak (2001), and Hart (2015). The objective of this research is to identify, within the frame of critical discourse analysis, those topics in Donald Trump's speech of December 2023, and Hitler's book, whose qualitative analysis will be complemented with data provided by Sketch Engine for the study of each corpus. The results show coincidences in the demonisation of the other, the emphasis on their undesirable characteristics, their representation as a threat and a “poison” for the in-group, and their association with criminals, terrorists and parasites.

The representation of unaccompanied foreign minors in the Spanish press: a linguistic study

Vincenzo Sanfilippo — 2025-11-14

The aim of this work is to focus on the representation of unaccompanied foreign minors (UFM) in the Spanish press. Mass media play a crucial role in contemporary society due to their power to influence public opinion. The investigation sheds light on the discursive construction of information regarding this group in the most popular Spanish newspapers, El Mundo and El País, between 2018 and 2023. The study adopts the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to observe how ideologies are reproduced in the representations of this subordinate group in the press and, simultaneously, highlight the presence of a protective or alarming discourse.

Female re-victimization in journalistic articles on femicide in Mexico

María Eugenia Flores Treviño — 2025-11-14

Language constructs and deconstructs people; it represents and projects its ethos and its social image, and as in this study, it can doubly violate the victims. Therefore, the management of journalistic discourse is a determining factor in the construction of the socio-discursive image of women who have been victims in cases of femicide in several states of Mexico. Gender-based violence is a phenomenon that suffocates society; and it is crossed by other geographical and socio-contextual factors in some events registered among the Mexican population. In this work, 5 cases of femicide and their narratives are reviewed -out of a corpus of 12- that were documented in the national and international press, to find the discursive patterns and resources and strategies in the linguistic actions related to the construction of the social image of the victim. With a methodology based on pragmatics and sociopragmatics as well as Critical Discourse Analysis, the publications produced on these cases that occurred between 2022 and 2023 are examined. Among the main trends is that the editors resort to sexist stereotypes regarding the actions or behaviors of the female victims.

Anti-trans discourse in the British press: analysis of intersubjective biases in Daily Mail headlines

Carmen González Gómez — 2025-11-14

The debate around trans rights is currently attracting a great deal of political and media attention in the European context. In the last five years, many countries have debated in their parliaments laws related to gender self-determination, trans children or legal procedures for sex change. Most Western European countries have paved the way for gender self-determination, while Eastern European countries are still reluctant. While the Transgender Europe (TGEU, 2024) report notes that the approach to trans people has advanced positively, it also notes a considerable increase in anti-trans backlash from some governments and conservative media. In the rankings conducted by the TGEU body, the UK scores one of the worst in Western Europe in 2024 (15.25 out of 32). The purpose of this paper is to study the discourse of one of the main British newspapers; to do so, it analyzes the 642 headlines published by the Daily Mail -the second most read newspaper on the Internet in the United Kingdom- on the trans issue during the second half of 2023. The research takes as its theoretical framework Halliday's (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Martin and White's (2005) valuation theory to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the intersubjective and ideological biases underlying the discourse. The results of the study show that most of the headlines contain discriminatory biases.

Religious communication on Instagram: an exploratory study of its discursive strategies

Carmen Vanesa Álvarez-Rosa — 2025-11-14

The purpose of this article is to explore the dominant discursive strategies in the posts made by @franciscus and @mossenvoro during the last two important religious festivities in the Catholic creed and the most recognized by the civilian population (Christmas 2023 and Easter 2024). In an increasingly connected world, social media plays a crucial role in the creation of religious narratives, the dissemination of spiritual messages and the building of online faith communities. Aware of this context, Benedict XVI in 2010 already encouraged priests to engage in the digital world to promote dialogue and catechesis, hence the growth of religious profiles on social networks. Despite this reality, there are few studies that examine these digital texts from the field of Communication and Discourse Analysis.