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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. 151–173

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Chapter 6
Do we think populists actually do something?

A discursive analysis of populists as agents or patients in tweets in French, Spanish, and Dutch

 | Université catholique de Louvain
Published online: 20 February 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.126.06de
Abstract
This chapter analyses how the term populist(s) is used in comparable corpora of French, Spanish and Dutch tweets, focusing more specifically on whether populists are presented as agentive and on what kind of actions are typically attributed to populists through a combination of corpus linguistics methods, agentivity analysis, and discourse analysis. The results show that populists are presented as agents of intentional actions, but also often as patients of those actions, or in association with non-intentional actions. The latter include cases where the mere fact of labelling someone as populist is discussed and contested. In this analysis, I also develop how both linguistic and sociopolitical contextual specificities influence the representation of populist(s) in the different comparable corpora involved.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.National contexts of Belgium, France, and Spain
  • 3.Theoretical background and key notions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Annotation method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Who are the populists?
    • 5.2Populists and intentionality
    • 5.3Patient or agent representation
    • 5.4Labelling others as populist(s) and contesting the categorisation as populists
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (54)
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