La evaluación del discurso referido en la prensa española a través de los verbos introductores

Abstract

A privileged resource for editors to bring diverse voices -maintaining at the same time their editorial principles- is the strategic use of the verba dicendi. By means of these verbs, the narrator points out to the reader what kind of value other speeches that he produces deserve, legitimizing or de-legitimizing them. We base our study on a 536,863-word corpus collected in 2010 from two antagonistic Spanish newspapers, El ABC and El País. We analyze and classify 122 verbal lexemes in a total of 4,437 syntactic structures. The analysis conducted led us to conclude that the writers of both newspapers abundantly use the verba dicendi as a resource to persuade readers and thus defend their own editorial principles.