Analyzing Linguistic Patterns in the Social Media Discourse of Juan Guaidó and Nicolás Maduro during the 2019 Political Conflict in Venezuela - research data

<p>In this paper, the political conflict in Venezuela in 2019 is approached from a corpus linguistic point of view. The conflict between Juan Guaid&oacute;, the speaker of the parliament, and Nicol&aacute;s Maduro, who won the internationally unrecognized 2018 presidential election, escalated on January 23, 2019, when Guaid&oacute; proclaimed himself the legitimate president of Venezuela. By comparatively analyzing the tweets of the two politicians three months before and after January 23, 2019, a corpus-based discourse analysis will be conducted to investigate whether and to what extent linguistic patterns (especially most frequent words and their co-occurrences, as well as n-grams) change within the respective social media communication of these political opponents. The analysis reveals changes in linguistic patterns, especially with respect to co-occurrences and n-grams, detected in the corpus data, and demonstrates that politicians use Twitter to present themselves, in the case of Guaid&oacute;, as the representative of the people wanting to lead Venezuela into a democratic future, and, in the case of Maduro, as the only legitimate president and defender of Venezuela against internal and external threats.</p>