Modalidad deóntica como expresión de la regulación social en el discurso político ciudadano en las cadenas de comentarios en blogs de periodismo

In the public sphere, individuals express duties and prohibitions to the social actors involved or mentioned in discussions about public matters. The aim is to regulate behaviour and influence the power struggles inside a given political space. In journalism blogs, the text is the medium through which commentators enter the public space and urge other social actors to perform those requested actions. Readers-commentators in blogs identify problems, evaluate and propose new ways of dealing with public issues. This quest for influencing the behaviour of social actors and institutions is known as social regulation. This research aimed to describe the different modes of social regulation found in the citizens’ political discourses in the comments sections of opinion columns. For that purpose, the deontic modality - which configures social regulation - was analysed in a corpus of 10 opinion columns and their respective chains of comments published in the Chilean journals El Mercurio and El Mostrador. The analysis showed that social regulations are addressed not only among the participants of this communicative practice, but also to social actors and/or institutions belonging to the public sphere, which do not participate in this discussion arena.