Epistemic stance and public discourse on irregular migration in one of Europe’s outermost regions

Abstract This article falls within the conceptual framework of critical discourse studies and cognitive linguistics whose attention has focused on the discourse found in the public sphere on the topic of migration. I will demonstrate the results of my analysis of a corpus composed of 74 opinion articles that were published in a Spanish regional newspaper between August 2020 and February 2021. All of them focus on the same issue: the mass arrival of irregular migrants at one of Europe’s outermost borders, the Canary Islands, and the social, political and economic strain that this is generating. The results of this analysis indicate that the periphrastic auxiliary verb poder (can/could/might) constitutes an essential resource for the way in which knowledge is managed by the authors whose intention is to fuel the debate by guiding the conceptualisation of reality of readers who do not have perceptual access to the events described.