NAMING DISPLACED PEOPLE:
!e migrant crisis has received huge media coverage and has been the subject of many social controversies, among which the one sparked by Al Jazeera regarding the words migrant and refugee during the summer 2015. !is study addresses the question of whether the lexical debate that followed had a perma...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho
2019-05-01
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| Series: | Diacrítica |
| Online Access: | http://diacritica.ilch.uminho.pt/index.php/dia/article/view/394 |
| Summary: | !e migrant crisis has received huge media coverage and has been the subject of
many social controversies, among which the one sparked by Al Jazeera regarding
the words migrant and refugee during the summer 2015. !is study addresses the
question of whether the lexical debate that followed had a permanent impact in
journalistic writing patterns, by analysing media typifications of displaced people.
Using a mixed methodology of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, we analysed
a corpus of 376,217 words from the two main French broadsheet newspapers,
Le Monde and Le Figaro, in order to observe if the lexical debate influenced the
choice of words of the journalists. !e results of the study show that if some changes
are visible a$er the debate (a higher frequency of refugee as well as an accurate
usage of this legal term), the latter did not prevent journalists from using the word
migrant (in spite of the negative connotations Al Jazeera decried). !e study concludes
with some hypotheses about the future of those terms, as they will continue
expanding their meaning and their referent according to historical events. |
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| ISSN: | 0870-8967 2183-9174 |