Legiones y Falanges: construcción lingüístico-discursiva del enemigo

The press, in addition to reflecting a “vocation of information “, performs a seriesof social functions, among which the formation of citizens and of critical recipients of mediaticdiscourse stands out. Yet, especially in some socio-political contexts, the press can be a vehiclefor a certain type of ideology, becoming an instrument to orient the recipient or, in extremecases, manipulate them, in order to justify or reinforce the image of a dominant ideologicalgroup. In this sense, the magazine Legiones y Falanges (1940-43) is exemplary, since, with aclearly populist discourse, it aims to extol the ideological foundations of Franco’s dictatorship.In other words, the main objective of the institutional enunciator of the magazine is to justifythe very essence of the regime, denouncing the culprits of the crisis that led to the “alzamiento”, and systematically attacking the enemy of the country. To this end, the locutors adopt all sortsof strategies, forging a discourse in which the Us-Them polarization, the use of a value lexiconand a wide range of legitimate -or not- argumentative strategies, stand out. As far as this workis concerned, within the theoretical framework of the studies of linguistic pragmatics, the ACDand the argumentation, I analyse a corpus of articles in which we can perceive the discursiveconstruction of the image of the enemy.