Cambios y permanencias en el discurso político argentino: el caso de la campaña electoral 2019

This paper is part of a large research on the changes presented in Argentina’s political communication since 2001 to date. Our aim is, in the first place, to investigate these transformations and determine in which realm they belong: within discourse (use of language) or, in a more general way, within political practices. Secondly, we evaluate the importance of such transformations and the eventual need for adjustments in conceptualizations that, in Argentina, discourse analysts have been using for many years. Our working hypothesis dictates that, beyond certain apocalyptic readings regarding a supposed lost of specificity in political discourse, it keeps its distinctive features and, therefore, we can argue that classical definitions have not become obsolete, but they need to be explained in detail for a better understanding of the new modalities in political practices (as in Fairclough, 2003). To verify our hypothesis, we analyse a corpus conformed by Facebook posts taken from the accounts of the two main candidates in 2019 Argentine presidential election. We contrast our results with the classical definitions of political discourse and some new explanations that propose an un-politicization of political discourse in XXI. We adopt Social Semiotics as main theoretical framework with a multimodal perspective.