Enunciation and topic/comment structure: the offensive replies to Pope Francis' tweets

Sentiment analysis is an automatised technique of analysis aimed to measure the â polarityâ and the â subjectivityâ of large corpora of messages. The case study of the present paper consists of a selection of Pope Francisâ tweets on ecological, social, religious themes and the relative polemic replies. In the degree of agreement/disagreement in response to a tweet, the referential function is not relevant; the emotive and conative functions prevail. The political strategies aimed at corroborating or refuting claims in terms of â fact checkingâ seem not relevant to these forms of communication based on personal enunciation, on the relation between the two simulacra â meâ and â youâ , and on the manifestation of one's own comment with respect to a topic. Furthermore, the techniques aimed at detecting the presence of hate speeches to apply, possibly, a precautionary censorship are lexical-sensitive, and fail to consider the context in which words co-occur. Finally, the paper presents a technique of analysis based on quantum information retrieval which can provide new insights on the relation between hashtag, address sign, topic, and reply.