{"title":"Appraising impoliteness on X: A case study of Isabel Díaz Ayuso","authors":"Sergei Sikorskii, María Luisa Carrió-Pastor","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2026.02.005","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines evaluative patterns in hostile replies to the Spanish politician Isabel Díaz Ayuso on X (formerly Twitter), combining Appraisal Theory with insights from digital-pragmatic and far-right discourse research. Through manual annotation of 498 Spanish-language replies collected between April and May 2025 – a period marked by renewed scandals surrounding Ayuso's administration – the analysis identifies how Judgment and Graduation resources construct gendered delegitimization. Five Judgment categories (Capacity, Tenacity, Normality, Veracity, Propriety) and multimodal intensification mechanisms (Force, Focus) were coded using diagnostic semantic criteria. Social Sanction judgments such as Propriety- (63.5 %) and Veracity- (20.4 %) vastly outweighed Social Esteem types, showing that moral blame and dishonesty dominate over competence critique. Intensification occurred in 70.1 % of replies—via typography, repetition, irony, and emoji-and 29.5 % contained explicitly gendered language, closely linked to Propriety- and Normality-evaluations (χ<sup>2</sup> = 52.85, p < 0.000001).</div><div>From these patterns, eleven recurrent impoliteness strategies were inductively derived, including sexualized moral judgment, ridicule, and clustered delegitimization. The paper advances the concept of evaluative gatekeeping, showing how moralized and gender-indexed assessments operate as pragmatic exclusion in online political discourse. Findings highlight how far-right communicative norms and gendered morality intersect to shape digital hostility toward female leaders.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"254 ","pages":"Pages 149-166"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2000,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216626000342","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2026/2/21 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This study examines evaluative patterns in hostile replies to the Spanish politician Isabel Díaz Ayuso on X (formerly Twitter), combining Appraisal Theory with insights from digital-pragmatic and far-right discourse research. Through manual annotation of 498 Spanish-language replies collected between April and May 2025 – a period marked by renewed scandals surrounding Ayuso's administration – the analysis identifies how Judgment and Graduation resources construct gendered delegitimization. Five Judgment categories (Capacity, Tenacity, Normality, Veracity, Propriety) and multimodal intensification mechanisms (Force, Focus) were coded using diagnostic semantic criteria. Social Sanction judgments such as Propriety- (63.5 %) and Veracity- (20.4 %) vastly outweighed Social Esteem types, showing that moral blame and dishonesty dominate over competence critique. Intensification occurred in 70.1 % of replies—via typography, repetition, irony, and emoji-and 29.5 % contained explicitly gendered language, closely linked to Propriety- and Normality-evaluations (χ2 = 52.85, p < 0.000001).
From these patterns, eleven recurrent impoliteness strategies were inductively derived, including sexualized moral judgment, ridicule, and clustered delegitimization. The paper advances the concept of evaluative gatekeeping, showing how moralized and gender-indexed assessments operate as pragmatic exclusion in online political discourse. Findings highlight how far-right communicative norms and gendered morality intersect to shape digital hostility toward female leaders.
期刊介绍:
Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.