Guest Lecture

26. October: Dr. Anna Islentyeva: Migration in the British Press: Combining Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies

Wednesday, 2022/10/26, 16:15


One of the most topical issues in British media and political discourses both before and after the 2016 EU membership referendum was European migration to the UK, which caused concerns about mass migration and potential loss of national sovereignty. Identities are relational concepts; the British have a long history of self-identification themselves as not European. The UK’s decision to leave the EU evidences growing concern over issues such as British self-determination and national identity. This talk discusses representations of European migrants in the British press between 2013 and 2018. The corpus-based analysis traces the linguistic devices employed by the press in reference to European migrants in the pre-referendum (2013–2015) and post-referendum periods (2016–2018), focusing on the different patterns employed by left- and right-wing newspapers. Furthermore, the analysis aims to uncover differences in how Europeans are presented compared to the British. The data represent two specialised news corpora, each containing 500 editorials, opinion pieces and news reports from five British mainstream newspapers. In terms of methodology, the study combines corpus-based analysis with discourse-analytical methods in order to investigate ideological bias in the modern British press.

Event organizer: CSLS
Speaker: Dr. Anna Islentyeva (Universität Innsbruck, Austria)
Date: 2022/10/26
Time: 16:15 - 18:00
Locality: F 013
Unitobler
Lerchenweg 36
3012 Bern
Characteristics: open to the public
free of charge