« A comparative analysis of the keyword multicultural(ism) in French, British, German and Italian migration discourse ». In Viola L., and Musolff A. (eds.), Migration and Media. Discourses about identities in crisis, John Benjamins., 13‑44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. (original) (raw)
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Migration and Media
This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use of the keywords multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998-2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language. Across the languages, the results show that the adjective multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation, and that the noun multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as 'failure'.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019
This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use of the keywords multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998-2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2014
This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocate with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) are calculated and this information is subsequently used to identify any ‘mismatch’ between the amount of attention that migrants from a given country receive in the media and the official population estimates. In the second, and most extensive stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities are analysed through the moral panic framework. Results show an extensive negative representation of some groups, but there is no evidence of a fully iterated moral panic relating to any of the nationalities investigated.
Iperstoria - Journal of American and English Studies, 2022
Combining the theoretical background of Critical Discourse Studies (van Dijk 2015a, 2015b; van Leeuwen 2008; Wodak 2015a) with a corpus-assisted methodology (van Diik 2015a; 2015b), this paper contrastively investigates the discursive representation of migration and migrant people by leading British (Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn) and Italian politicians (Matteo Salvini, Matteo Renzi) in the years 2016-2018, starting from the examination of the collocational profile of such migration-related terms as immigration, immigrant, migrant, refugee and asylum seeker. The period is salient for the global upsurge of populism (Mudde 2004), the Brexit referendum, and the so-called 'refugee crisis,' which turned immigration into a hot topic in the political agenda of parties of different orientations. Our empirical analysis sheds light on two opposing views: the negative portrayal of migrants as a threat by right-wing populist politicians across countries (Lorenzetti 2020), while left-wing politicians display a more humanitarian attitude. Regardless of political stance or specific migrant terms, however, the representation of migrant groups as social actors is crucially founded on the strategies of aggregation, collectivisation and functionalisation (van Leeuwen 2008), which ultimately result in the perpetuation of stereotyped and partial depictions that overlook their features as individuals.
Calzada Pérez, María, 2023
This study examines migration representation in three parliamentary chambers: the Spanish Chamber, the European Parliament, and the British House of Commons. The time span of its analysis coincides with the eighth Legislature of Spain (2004-2008). The reasons for this decision are straightforward. If parliaments portray or construct ideological debates in democratic societies, it seems logical to turn our attention to them as a means of assessing the nature and quality of comparable but different multicultural environments in which migration is a major defining feature. Furthermore, this time span allows for an examination of such societies at different ideological phases, for example, Spain's conceptualisation of migration in the initial stages of parliamentary representation. The study expands the method of corpus-assisted analysis through a critical theoretical framework proposed by the sociopolitical scientist Zapata-Barrero. Data were obtained from the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive of Parliamentary Speeches. Well-established tools in corpus linguistics, such as frequency and collocation, were employed, leading to an examination of Zapata-Barrero's reactive and proactive discourses. The quantitative methods used were especially in-depth, undertaking an exhaustive descriptive and statistical treatment and aiming to strengthen the validity of subsequent qualitative analyses. Consequently, a virtuous circle was achieved: the corpus linguistic procedures reached higher levels of theoretical abstraction, while Zapata-Barrero's framework gained robustness and more potential for generalisation. The study's originality, thus, lies in the mutual synergies activated by this theoretical and methodological combination.
Migrant Crisis in European Multilingual Media: Identity Construction across Languages
2020
International news articles published in various languages are usually tailored by the editors for their target readers in the corresponding language. On the one hand, the transformations made to the textual structure of news are intended to offer better accessibility to the information and make it more relevant to the readers in the target culture. On the other hand, the domestication of news provides compatibility with social attitudes, cultural background and shared knowledge of language users. Many such adjustments are made to the structures related to national and cultural identities and their construction. This paper will consider rhetorical and linguistic devices of discursive identity construction in the media coverage of events related to the EU migration crisis in four European languages (English, French, German and Spanish), as well as analyze their potential role in framing public opinion towards the migrant crisis.
2016
This article suggests a theoretical and methodological framework for a systematic contrastive discourse analysis across languages and discourse communities through keywords. This constitutes a lexical approach to discourse analysis which is considered to be particularly fruitful for comparative analysis. We use a corpus-assisted methodology, presuming meaning to be constituted, revealed, and constrained by collocation environment. We compare the use of the keywords intégration/Integration in French and German public discourses about migration on the basis of newspaper corpora built from two French and German newspapers from 1998 to 2011. We look at the frequency of these keywords over the given time span, group collocates into thematic categories, and discuss indicators of discursive salience by comparing the development of collocation profiles over time in both corpora as well as the occurrence of neologisms and compounds based on intégration/Integration.
EU Report, 2019
Since the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015, the concept of free movement has been put under pressure by several EU member states. Still, EU citizens’ attitudes toward free movement are very different from one member state to the other. In order to understand possible sources of such attitudes and trace back changes in discourses on free movement to the early 2000’s, we argue that one has to take a closer look at media coverage on migration in Europe.
This paper presents an analysis of discourses surrounding the representation of minority groups in newspapers and demonstrates how this discourse in turn constructs these groups" identity. The analysis took place in the context of a project looking at the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in UK newspapers. A corpus was built for the purposes of this study and comprises 140 million words (175,000 articles from 15 UK newspapers), spanning 1996-2005. The paper focuses on the contribution of corpus research to (critical) discourse analysis and, more specifically, on the collocational analysis of the words refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM). It does so by developing the notion of consistent collocates (akin to key keywords; i.e. collocates present in at least seven out of the ten annual subcorpora). Collocations are a suitable vehicle for the discoursal presentation of a group, because they can contribute to "a semantic analysis of a word" (Sinclair, 1991), and because "they can convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement" . The analysis also employs the related notions of semantic preference, semantic prosody, and discourse prosody. The clustering of consistent collocations provides evidence of systematic semantic associations as well as metaphors commonly employed in racist discourse. Arguably, these patterns reveal elements of the underlying discourses relating to RASIM.