Corpus-Based Analysis of Ideological Bias Migration in the British Press

Corpus-Based Analysis of Ideological Bias presents research combining a range of corpus-linguistic techniques which are employed to analyse how migration discourse is (re)constructed in the contemporary British press. Two specialised corpora containing 1,000 news reports, editorials, and opinion pieces from five major national British newspapers were collected and annotated for this research. The event separating these two corpora is the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU). In its analysis, this book: employs both quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, with four case studies offering a broad perspective on how the topical socio-political issues of migration and asylum seeking are represented by left- and right-wing British newspapers; explores how newspapers reveal their political orientation and promote their political agenda by employing specific linguistic patterns and discursive strategies – in this case, in the representation of the key social actors within migration discourse; provides case studies that place a particular focus on the discourses surrounding European migrants and migration within the EU, which proved to be a very popular topic in the British press both before and after the 2016 EU membership referendum; and offers a comparative corpus analysis that seeks to ascertain whether media discourse regarding EU migration has changed in the wake of the referendum. This book is a useful source not only for students of English, linguistics, and media studies, but also for researchers in the fields of applied corpus linguistics, critical discourse studies, contemporary media analysis, and metaphor research.

Acknowledgments List of Figures List of Tables Introduction: Language Corpora and Media Discourse on Migration Chapter 1: Ideology in the Contemporary Media: Bias in the British Press Chapter 2: Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis: Data Collection and Corpus Construction Chapter 3: Discursive Representations of Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Immigrants, and Migrants (RASIM) Prior to the EU Referendum Chapter 4: Discursive Representations of Migrants after the EU Referendum Chapter 5: The English Garden: A Metaphor for English Society Chapter 6: The Metaphorical Motif of War in the British Press Conclusion: Principles of Cohesion and Evaluation in Newspaper Texts Appendix

Anna Islentyeva is a research associate and senior lecturer in sociolinguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her scientific interests include semantics, conceptual metaphor, discourse analysis, and critical discourse studies. Anna is interested in research that places a special emphasis on the social aspects of language and examines ideologically relevant linguistic patterns in different types of discourses. Her current research projects address media discourses surrounding European migration following the EU referendum, as well as representations of Europe and Britain in the British media. Her recent publications include The Europe of Scary Metaphors (2019) and The Undesirable Migrant in the British Press (2018).