Resumen de Spatial deixis within political discourse on Twitter
This chapter presents the results of a qualitative study of spatial deixis within a corpus of messages published by Spanish political leaders on Twitter. Through a corpus-based analysis, and adopting a cyberpragmatic approach, the aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of the notion of place in political discourse on social media. The results show that political leaders move along different physical, mental, and virtual places. They employ mainly the proximal deictic aquí (here) for signalling the physical place where they are located and to highlight his/her subjective proximity to that place and its inhabitants. The use of distal deictics is scarce but strategic in this context to confront the adversary’s ideological position. Moreover, in the multimodal and complex virtual space of the microblog affordances such as hashtags play an essential role in the discursive construction of place.
