Political commentary shows in Twitter: a neurocommunicative model of discourse analysis

Abstract

In this paper we apply to the social network Twitter a model of analysis of political and media discourse developed in previous publications. The model aims to reconcile the study of discourse data with explanatory proposals about political communication (neurocommunication, neuropolitics) and digital communication (Internet as fifth state, convergence, collective intelligence). We assume that there are categories of discursive frame that can be treated as indicators of cognitive and communicative skills. These categories are analysed and grouped in three main dimensions: intentional (ilocutional force of the tweet, interpretive frame of the hastags), referential (topics, agents), and interactive (structural predictability and alignment, intertextuality and dialogism markers, and partisan affiliation). The corpus consists of 4116 tweets: 3000 tweets belonging to the TV programs Al Rojo Vivo, Las Mañanas de Cuatro y Los Desayunos de TVE, and 1116 tweets of followers of the programs, 45 tweets correspond to each program. The results confirm that the model allows identify different profiles of political subjectivity in the accounts of Twitter.