Las columnas de la lengua sobre comunicación política del Marqués de Tamarón y de Álex Grijelmo: la “lengua” de los políticos en cuestión

The objective of this paper is to investigate the analysis of political communication carried out in the columns on language published in Spanish newspapers after the political period known as the Transition. For this study, we have selected two columnists, the Marques de Tamaron and Alex Grijelmo, who write, respectively, in the eighties of the twentieth century and in the first decades of the twenty-first. We have examined their treatment of the resources and strategies indicated in discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics to characterize the political uses of language. The results of our analysis show that the Marques de Tamaron opts for a sociological characterization of the “incorrect” speech of politicians, while Grijelmo is more interested in the legitimacy of the speech of political actors. We can conclude that the linguistic discussion presented in these columns is not solely motivated by the purposes of the metalinguistic genre to which they are assigned. In the case of the Marques de Tamaron, the purpose is to interpret the social changes that induce jargon used by politicians, while in Grijelmo’s case, it is the manipulation of the political events referred to in the discourse.