engleski

Migrant crisis in British and Italian media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The current migrant crisis in Europe is reaching historic proportions and, as a result, has received much attention and wide international media coverage. Among the numerous questions raised, the one that deserves special consideration is the question of language used in the media to talk about migrants and the migrant crisis. The present study explores the role of language in creating and shaping the attitudes towards migrants in the British and Italian media. Both the United Kingdom and Italy could be labelled as traditionally immigrant countries. However, the recent influx of migrants has been particularly acute in Italy. The goal of this study is to investigate whether there are any differences between the way the two languages are used in relation to migrants and the migrant crisis. Situated within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and drawing on Halliday's transitivity model, developed in his Systemic Functional Grammar, the study analyses how migrants are linguistically represented in online newspaper articles. The approach adopted is interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. First, by focusing on discursive strategies of nomination and predication (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001), the study explores discursive representation of migrants as a social group. More precisely, it examines how migrants are identified and what characteristics are attributed to them. Furthermore, the construction of an Us vs. Them binary, generally executed through positive self- presentation and negative other-presentation, is also investigated. Second, using Halliday’s transitivity model (1985, 2004) as an analytical tool, at an ideational level the study examines the way the media discourse reconstructs and represents the migrant crisis. The analysis is intended to define the types of attitudes towards migrants encoded in language structures. Namely, transitivity analysis focuses on language structures expressing different types of processes in which migrants are presented either as Actors or Goals (Patients) of an action. The Actor/Goal relationship is considered in an Us/Them context, so as to identify the position and perception of migrants in European society.

migrant crisis ; British media ; Italian media ; critical discourse analysis

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