Modalización de la opinión y argumentación en blogs.

The use of the language on the Internet and on blogs has raised interest for decades, both for the linguistic peculiarities it presents and its ability to influence the communication habits of the speakers. On this occasion, we focus on the presence of viewpoint adverbials in a corpus of Spanish blog posts on different topics, with their respective comments. The interest in studying these modal units lies in their high polyfunctionality and their heavy dependence on contextual and superstructural factors. This corpus has been subjected to a quantitative-qualitative analysis, carried out from the perspective of pragmatic linguistics, so that we have been able to determine the scarce presence of opinion modalizers in the posts, in contrast to the more pronounced use in comments made by readers. From an argumentative point of view, these units function mainly as mitigation devices, in order to preserve the image of bloggers and the membership of the virtual community by commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]