Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Law Ricardo Jiménez recently presented his study on the lexical forms of the word “pueblo” [people] used by the political parties Ciudadanos and Podemos in their manifestos and tweets. 

According to the lecturer, this work analyses several of the epistemic discourse categories proposed by Van Dijk (2010) and divides the composition of the multimodal texts into two main forms. Some of the techniques inherent in corpus linguistics were also applied.

With all of this, Jiménez put together a list of words such as citizen, person and family, for instance, all directly related to the concept of “pueblo”. Afterwards, he compared the number of times these words appeared in the parties’ manifestos and in their tweets following last August’s attack. The results show that the ideology behind Ciudadanos’ and Podemos’ use of the concept of “pueblo” is quite different.

According to Jiménez, the concept of “pueblo” in Ciudadanos’ manifestos is more closely connected to the economic situation and legal protection, while, in the case of the party led by Pablo Iglesias, the concept relates to the protection of people and the recognition of their rights. 

Furthermore, the language used in Podemos’ tweets is emotional, in the case of both text and emoticons, while that used by Ciudadanos prioritises the viewpoint of the law and state.