Legitimisation and Persuasion in Discourse: Effective Stance in Journalistic and Political Discourse in English and Spanish

Effective stance strategies are used by speakers/writers to legitimise action plans and events, which may be in their interest, and persuade or coerce hearers/readers into accepting them. Effective stance resources include a variety of lexico-grammatical elements of deonticity, directivity and the expression of normativity, intentionality and potentiality. This chapter follows a contrastive, corpus-based approach to explore the similarities or differences in the distribution and use of effective stance strategies in journalistic discourse and in political discourse in English and Spanish. More specifically, the use of effective stance markers was analysed in political speeches (UK Conservative Party and Labour Party, Spanish Partido Popular and Partido Socialista Obrero Español), as representatives of centre-right and centre-left ideologies, and in opinion columns from newspapers of both right-wing and left-wing leanings (UK: The Guardian, The Times; Spain: El País, ABC). The results have revealed distinct and significant distributions of tokens in the categories of stance in political and in journalistic discourse in both languages.