Organización de unidades en el desarrollo del discurso político

Abstract

Current approaches to the study of political speeches insist on the traditional textual structure consisting of ‘introduction, body and conclusion’ (cf. Reisgl 2008). Cortés (2011) complements this structure with thematic units, so that the introduction, the body and the conclusion are made up of multiple ‘themes’ and ‘sub-themes’. This article focuses on the units of the body of the speech, taking them as ‘discourse units’ (cf. Garrido, 2011): structured units that build structures through ‘coherence relations’ (cf. Mann y Thompson 1988). In order to describe the organization of the body of the speech, we analyze the first sentences of its discourse units, where the text is organized by means of ‘indirect coherent relations’ (cf. Duque 2014). Results show that these relations shape a far more complex organization than the succession of themes. Our approach is illustrated with the analysis of the 2006 State of the Madrid Region Address.