The project's main aim is to explore the discursive construction of polarisation and national identity in a corpus of X posts of Santiago Abascal and Jair Bolsonaro, the main far-right populist leaders in Spain and Brazil, respectively. The corpus covers the years 2020 and 2021, that is, the key years in the Covid-19 pandemic, so as to provide a recent account of these extreme populisms. To analyse polarisation in this context and corpus, the project looks at different construal operations, including polarising metaphors, image schemas (especially force dynamics), profiling, metonymy and specificity.
This corpus contains a sample of X posts (formerly tweets) posted in Santiago Abascal and Jair Bolsonaro's official X accounts (@Santi_ABASCAL and @jairbolsonaro, respectively) during the years 2020 and 2021. Both original posts and quoted tweets are included. Reposts and responses were excluded, as well as posts in languages other than Spanish and Portuguese and those containing only emojis and images. The corpus adds up to a total number of 4992 posts (152407 words).
The corpus was divided into two subcorpora for practical purposes, each corresponding to the politicians under study, i.e., Santiago Abascal and Jair Bolsonaro.
