This paper reports partial results of a major project concerned with the analysis of interaction through written text, the aim of which is the study of the various manifestations of evaluation in discourse. Previous research on newspaper editorials has shown that evaluation plays a fundamental role in shaping discourse patterns (Bolivar, 1986). Political discourse is chosen for its fundamentally evaluative function. The major aim is to describe similarities between spoken and written discourse, with attention to the internal structure of texts and to the dialogue created between texts in the intertextual relation system. This paper describes aspects of the interaction between Venezuelan political parties as seen through texts published in the national press. The objective at this stage is to identify the participants in the dialogue, and to describe (a) how they see each other and their voters and (b) what they do with language and what they say. The structure of the dialogue is the aim of the next stage. Some of the most revealing results are: (a) Two parties, out of 22, keep the floor consistently; (b) topics change in time from a wide range to a restricted set, mainly the campaign itself; and (c) there is an apparent dominance of the interactive over the semantic plane of the discourse.
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