Twitter as a source of change in political discourse

Social media are changing the way people interact and share information and opinions; through a continuous stream of conversations, their users negotiate and maintain new kinds of social relationships. Twitter, more specifically, is emerging as one of the places where political activity is undertaken. Political actors use it to spread a positive representation of themselves, and to construct their political identities within conversational flows. This paper aims to study the new strategies introduced by Twitter in political discourse, and the ways politicians face this new approach to their audience, based on horizontal and pervasive forms of conversation, and on the expression of personal attitudes and emotions. Conversationality and evaluative attitude are analysed in a corpus of tweets written by Italian politicians, with specific reference to the use of mention (the @ operator) and of selected linguistic features that provide evidence of the instantiation of a dialogue or the expression of an evaluative attitude.