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In:Conspiracy Theory Discourses
Edited by Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 98] 2022
► pp. 295–316

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Chapter 13
The New World Order on Twitter

Evaluative language in English and Spanish tweets

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.98.13mor
Abstract
This chapter explores the evaluative language used in relation to the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory from the perspective of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) in English and Spanish. Given the scarcity of analyses that go beyond the distinction between positive and negative evaluation, this chapter discusses the authors’ approach to events and figures related to the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory. For that purpose, a corpus of 1,000 tweets about the NWO was annotated and analysed regarding Attitude realisations. The results show that authors use mainly a Judgement approach, which evaluates people socially and morally, in both languages. However, it is less frequent in Spanish, in favour of references to the value of the targeted entities (Appreciation). These evaluations were not found to be argued, but merely asserted.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conspiracy theories, the NWO, Twitter and their language
    • 2.1The New World Order
    • 2.2Language and sentiment in conspiracy theory discourse
    • 2.3Appraisal Theory
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Attitude results
    • 4.2General observations
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
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