The semantic prosody of the words inmigración and inmigrante in the Spanish written media: A corpus-based study of two national newspapers
Several studies, such as the one carried out by Checa and Arjona (2011), show the negative view of the Spanish media towards immigration from a social perspective, in which immigration is conceived as a threat and an invasion that causes fear and hostility. However, this negative view has been barely analysed from a linguistic perspective. In particular, this study aims to explore the semantic prosody of the Spanish lexical items inmigración (immigration) and inmigrante (immigrant) in written media. For this purpose, an ad hoc corpus of news on the phenomenon of immigration has been compiled. News between 2003 and 2013 from two national newspapers with different political ideology (El Mundo and El País) were collected. The analysis of the news was carried out with WordSmith, a corpus analysis software which enabled us to observe the co-occurrences of the words inmigrante and inmigración. The results reveal that most of the words co-occurring with inmigrante and inmigración have an unfavourable meaning. These results confirm those of sociological studies which have found a feeling of rejection towards the phenomenon of immigration. Therefore, our results evidence how this negative feeling is also represented in the media discourse.
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Digital revista |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Instituto de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje
2016
|
| Online Access: | http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-09342016000200001 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|