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

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.