Creation of a corpus on the economic-financial discourse in Spanish: preambles for the study of lexis modalization

Abstract

This paper has as its aim to describe a corpus on the economic-financial discourse in Spanish produced by Spain's social agents and disseminated by the mass media. This corpus contains the periodical publications of different Spanish media, both general- interest and specialized ones, in the fields of economy and finance, within the journalistic news subgenre. The usefulness of this corpus was assessed when the study of lexical modalization began, especially with regard to the selection of words by senders. This proves firstly that the principle of objectivity which should prevail in this journalistic subgenre is not always observed; and secondly, that this type of corpus not only may be valid to study the remaining linguistic features which characterize this type of discourse but also it can be used for other purposes, such as the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.