Preliminary Programme

In 2012 at ESSCH in Glasgow I presented a paper about the perception of immigrants found in the pages of some national Italian newspapers. In this new talk I will examine the perception of migration matters found in the newspapers on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean: perceptions and words associated with migration, immigration, and trips to Europe in the language used in the Northern-African press. As in a previous presentation, I have been conducting linguistic research on the frequencies and cotexts regarding migration in a series of newspaper articles published in the second half of 2009 (in the same period of my previous research) and in weekly magazines and political and cultural reviews published in English or in French. The same stemming criterion is applied to both studies: migrat*; immigr*, depart*, emigr*, clandest* ecc. for French reviews, and migr* immigr* emigr* clandest* legal* asylum, etc. for English newspapers and reviews. The questions that arise are: how are migration matters linguistically contextualized within the African press? What is the lexicon describing the phenomenon in the African press, and what is the image of Europe delivered in such articles through adjectives, nouns and verbs? Are there mirrored stereotypes concerning life and people in Europe on the Southern shore of the Mediterranean? (Show less)

When Angela Merkel in 2010 remarked that the idea of a multicultural society in Germany has ‘utterly failed’, she referred to multicultural society as a political approach to dealing with migration that has long been discarded by the German conservatives. Instead, Merkel was able to build consensus around her politics of integration. In British newspapers, her remark has been considered as a rather disturbing problematizing of immigration. In British discourse, multicultural society is used to describe the social reality in the UK as a result of immigration processes. In this paper, we will provide empirical evidence of the different uses of these two key words in British and German migration discourse, building on corpora of British and German conservative and left-liberal newspapers between 1998-2012. We will address the respective salience and discursive behaviour of the terms multicultural society and multikulturelle Gesellschaft by looking at frequency distributions over time and at lexical items that statistically saliently co-occur with the two terms (collocations). We will also differentiate usage in conservative versus left-liberal newspapers, acknowledging contrasts not only between the status and semantic scope of the terms in the different discourse communities, but also from different political standpoints.
Schröter, Melani (2013) ‘Kontrastive Analyse politischen Diskurses. Skizze, Verkomplizierung und Ausblick‘. In: Kilian, Jörg; Niehr, Thomas (eds.): Politik als sprachlich gebundenes Wissen im lebenslangen Lernen und politischen Handeln. Bremen: Hempen (in press).
Wengeler, Martin (1995): ‘Multikulturelle Gesellschaft oder Ausländer raus? Der sprachliche Umgang mit der Einwanderung seit 1945‘. In: Georg Stötzel, Martin Wengeler (Hg.): Kontroverse Begriffe. Geschichte des öffentlichen Sprachgebrauchs in der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, S. 711-749.
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In this paper I address the discursive behaviour of the terms community and comunita’ in English and Italian newspaper discourse on the topic of migration. These terms function as ‘discourse keywords’ (as discussed in the introductory paper in this panel) within the discussion of migration and their salience stems from the frequency of co-occurrence within this context, the importance of the concepts they represent and their perceived role within the discourse. With reference to frequency of co-occurrence, community/comunita’ are both statistically salient collocates of immigrant/immigrato; in other words they occur together significantly more frequently than would be expected with a random distribution. In terms of perceived relevance, searching for occurrences of the word community (and Italian equivalent) in UK and Italian websites showed that there was substantial, ongoing meta-discussion of these terms (8,790 and 14,200 hits respectively). Furthermore, community is well-established as central concept within discussion of migration, for instance it is discussed as one of fourteen keywords within migration discourse in Gallissot et al. (2007). Gallissot (2007: 65) describes how ‘“community” serves to define the ingroup and delimit the borders of membership and of the distinction between “us” and “them”, consequently placing “the others” outside, excluding them’ (translation from Italian). However, discourse analysis has indicated that in both English (Baker et al. 2013) and Italian (Taylor 2009) newspaper discourse it is those who are labelled as a community that are represented as being outside the ‘unmarked’ norm or society. Therefore, in this paper I will first analyse the extent to which the discourse keywords community and comunita’ actually refer to the same concept, and second how these keywords are used and deployed within migration discourse.
Baker, P., C. Gabrielatos and T. McEnery. 2013. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The representation of Islam in the British press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallissot, R., M. Kilani and A. Rivera. 2007. L’Imbroglio Etnico in Quattordici Parole-Chiave (3rd Edition). Bari: Edizioni Dedalo.
Taylor, C. 2009. ‘The representation of immigrants in the Italian press’. CirCap Occasional Papers.
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This paper will compare the uses of Intégration and Integration in French and German newspaper discourse about migration, based on corpora of French and German conservative and left-liberal newspapers between 1998-2012. The history of the usage of these terms in French and German contexts is different, but in current migration discourse, they are widely used and play a prominent role in both discourses – unlike in the UK. We will be looking at frequency distributions over time within the corpus, also in relation to the political stance of the newspapers. In a next step, we will unravel in more detail the semantics of these key words in their discursive contexts. From a discursive point of view, what is interesting specifically about these terms is the ambiguity of their predicative structure. The word rules several arguments because in both languages, it stems from a verb : ‘intégrer/integrieren’ ( A1 intregrates A2 in A3) or ‘s’intégrer/sich integrieren’ (A2 integrates itself in A3). Where it is used as a noun, all the three arguments are not necessarily explicitly verbalized in the sentence, which is a general characteristic of this type of nouns, and in discourse contexts, it is relevant to look at explicit versus implicit predicates. An analysis of lexical items that statistically saliently co-occur with the two terms (collocations) reveals a discursive bias towards certain groups of immigrants. The most salient groups in relation to intégration/Integration in France and Germany are muslims, i.e. in France migrants from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) and in Germany, migrants from Turkey and other Arabic and Middle Eastern countries.
Bonnafous, Simone (1991) L'immigration prise aux mots, Les immigrés dans la presse au tournant des années 80. Paris, éditions Kimé, 301 p.
Barats, Christine (1994) Intégration et immigration dans les discours de François Mitterrand (1981 -1990). Thèse de science politiques, Université Paris 1.
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