The Representation of Refugees and Migrants in the Italian Media Discourse

The ‘migration discourse’, including the ‘refugee crisis’, has been the subject of different works analyzing how the public images and identities of refugees are constructed (Krzyzanowski et al. 2018). Over the last decade the use of corpus linguistics methods in discourse analyses (Bubenhofer 2009; Spitzmüller and Warnke 2011; Bubenhofer et al. 2014; Flinz 2019) have provided the opportunity to focus on typical language usage with the help of corpus linguistic tools, since the choice of a collocation (Xiao 2015) can create a reference to a complex framework of ideological-political understanding (Linke and Feilke 2009: 7). The aim of this paper is thus to provide quantitative–qualitative evidence for the construction of the public image of refugees in Italian. We approach this by analyzing the discourse on the ‘migration crisis’ in the Italian national press, since media not only shape the perceptions of readers, but also rely on collective ‘common sense’ in an attempt to persuade their audience (Lakoff and Johnson 2014: 270). More specifically, we use corpus linguistics methods, as the study examines an ad-hoc built corpus (ITNEW), which has been extracted from three Italian daily newspapers: LA REPUBBLICA, with a centre-left political stance; LA STAMPA, with a political alignment considered centrist and liberalist; LIBERO QUOTIDIANO, with a right-wing and populist/neoliberal stance. The corpus, whose temporal focus is 2015–2017 and which has been loaded in the corpus query system Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), has been analyzed focusing on collective names addressing the affected people in the migration dis- course, i.e. ‘immigrati’ (‘immigrants’), ‘migranti’ (‘migrants’), ‘profughi’ (‘refu- gees’), ‘richiedenti asilo’ (‘asylum seekers’), and ‘rifugiati’ (‘refugee’).