“Maleducados/Ill-mannered” during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter

Abstract

Abstract This paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the label maleducado /ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from five ad hoc corpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital discourse provided by Sketch Engine. The analysis adopts a corpus-based metapragmatic approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that maleducado was the most frequent metapragmatic label under scrutiny in the Twitter corpora and motivated the subsequent study of lay conceptualizations of this term.