The project's main aim is to explore the discursive construction of polarisation in two corpora of political discourses (one including speeches and interviews, and another X posts) of Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó, the key figures in the Venezuelan Presidential Crisis. This event began on January 23rd, 2019, when Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself interim president of Venezuela even though Nicolás Maduro had already won the general elections in May 2018. To analyse polarisation in this context and corpus, the project looks at its evaluative collocates, polarising metaphors and social actor representations.
This sample contains two corpora: one of 5 political speeches addressed by Maduro and Guaidó and 4 political interviews targeting these leaders and carried out by the international TV channels BBC and Euronews (33547 words in total), and another of 5448 X posts (199916 words) posted in Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó's official X accounts (@NicolasMaduro and @JGuaido, respectively) during the first and most active year of the presidential crisis, i.e., 2019-2020. Both original posts and retweets are included. Posts in languages other than Spanish were excluded, as well as those containing only emojis and images. As for the political speeches and interviews, the speeches were delivered by both leaders the day of Guaidó's self-proclamation (23 January 2019) and exactly a year after that (23 January 2020), and the interviews were conducted around the same dates (February and March 2019), as detailed below:
Nicolás Maduro:
- Annual commemoration speech and response to Guaidó's self-proclamation (23/01/2019)
- Annual commemoration speech (23/01/2020)
- BBC interview (12/02/2019)
- Euronews interview (13/02/2019)
Juan Guaidó:
- Self-proclamation speech (23/01/2019)
- World Economic Forum speech (23/01/2020)
- National Conflict Resolution speech (21/02/2020)
- Euronews interview (18/02/2019)
- BBC interview (15/03/2019)
Each corpus was divided into two subcorpora for practical purposes, each corresponding to the politicians under study, i.e., Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó.
