Linguistic strategies referring to politicians in the Spanish written press: an analysis of appositive constructions

Abstract

This article proposes an empirical study on the naming strategies when referring to politicians. More precisely, our analysis is based on a corpus of journalistic articles in contemporary Spanish and gathers a homogeneous set of so-called loose appositive constructions referring to politicians. The aim of the study is to provide a structured analysis of the linguistic features of the appositive constructions collected in our database. We will argue that the 1084 appositive constructions examined present a predicational relationship. We distinguish between three types of predicational appositive constructions: specificational, attributional, and identificational constructions. Together with a description of the syntactic and semantic characteristics of these constructions, we also examine their informative role in journalistic articles. More precisely, we consider how syntax reflects a different semantic content and a different discourse function.