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In:Multilingual Corpus Research: Advances and challenges
Edited by Noelia Ramón and María Pérez Blanco
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 126] 2026
► pp. 45–70

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Chapter 2
Effective stance in English and Spanish newspaper opinion articles on irregular immigration and humanitarian crises

The Independent versus El Mundo

 | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
 | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.02car
Abstract
This paper presents a quantitative and contrastive analysis of effective stance — the kind of stance aimed at determining or influencing the course of reality — in opinion articles from two newspapers of comparable ideology, The Independent from the United Kingdom and El Mundo from Spain. The corpus under analysis consists of two subcorpora of 60,000 words from each newspaper concerning irregular immigration and humanitarian crises involving refugees. The study uncovers differences in the quantity and distribution of effective stance expressions in the two subcorpora and intra-subcorpus dissimilarities between articles on irregular immigration and humanitarian crises, thus shedding light on the ways in which columnists aim at persuading readers to share their viewpoints regarding these issues.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Effective stance: Concept, types, criteria and review of the literature
    • 2.1The concepts of epistemic and effective stance
    • 2.2Subcategories of effective stance
    • 2.3Criteria for delimiting effective stance
    • 2.4Review of the literature on effective stance
  • 3.Aims of the paper and research hypotheses
  • 4.Corpus description and annotation
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2The annotation and statistical analysis
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Use of effective stance expressions in The Independent versus El Mundo
      • 5.1.1Deonticity and Potentiality: The preferred choice
        • 5.1.1.1DM in The Independent and El Mundo
        • 5.1.1.2POT in The Independent and El Mundo
      • 5.1.2NRM, DIR, INC and INT markers in The Independent and El Mundo
    • 5.2Effective stance categories used in humanitarian and immigration subcorpora
      • 5.2.1DM and POT across subcorpora
      • 5.2.2DIR and NRM across subcorpora
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (31)
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