Polarisation in Venezuelan presidential tweets

Metaphors and social actor representations as divisive tools

Bibliographic Data

ID7159796
AuthorsSilvia Peterssen (0000-0001-5575-8749, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume13
Issue2
Pages240-275
Publication date2025-08-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language Aggression and Conflict (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2213-1272 • E-ISSN: 2213-1280
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlac.00093.pet
OpenAlexW4394835770
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited53

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

Ideology · Interim · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Presidential election · Presidential system · Social media · Sociology · Victory · Computer Science · Cultural and political discourse analysis · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

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