Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First Articles

Polarisation in Venezuelan presidential tweets

Metaphors and social actor representations as divisive tools

ORCID logo | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

The Venezuelan Presidential Crisis emerged as a unique polarising political scenario in January 2019, when Juan Guaidó, president of the National Assembly, proclaimed himself interim president of the country, despite the victory obtained by Nicolás Maduro in the May 2018 presidential elections. Considering this context and the role of social media in the spread of polarisation, the present manuscript examines how metaphors and social actor representations act as divisive discursive tools in the tweets of Maduro and Guaidó. To do so, a corpus of tweets posted by these politicians during the first year of the conflict (2019–2020) is analysed, adopting a target-based approach (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006) to identify the polarising metaphors and a socio-cognitive framework (Darics and Koller 2019; van Leeuwen 2008) to study the social actor representations. The results reveal that these discursive devices help both leaders to construct their social identities, legitimise themselves, delegitimise the other and reproduce their polarising ideological schemas.

Keywords: polarisation, polarising metaphors, social actor representations, Venezuela, presidential tweets
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Polarisation, political discourse, and Twitter
  • 3.Polarising metaphors and social actor representations
  • 4.Methodology: A corpus-based approach to polarisation
  • 5.Polarising metaphors and social actor representations in Venezuelan presidential tweets
    • 5.1Polarising metaphors
      • 5.1.1Propositional-schematic metaphors
      • 5.1.2Event-schematic metaphors
      • 5.1.3Image-schematic metaphors
    • 5.2Social actor representations
      • 5.2.1Inclusion and exclusion
      • 5.2.2Evaluation
      • 5.2.3Grammatical action
      • 5.2.4Personalisation and impersonalisation
  • 6.Implications and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00093.pet
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