Il discorso sulle migrazioni nei media italiani: approcci quantitativi, qualitativi e multimodali = The discourse on migration in thè Italian media: quantitative and qualitative methods in a multimodal perspective

Orru Paolo

2020-01-01

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Abstract

Since the early nineties of the last century, Italy has become an attractive destination for thousands of foreign citizens. Media discourse, and above all thè journalistic one, developed narrative trends that have rem aimed Constant over the next two decades. There were two themes mainly dealt with in therepresentation of migrants: arrivals through the Mediterranean and the crime-immigration nexus. Though the European field of language studies has shown a discreet vivacity, the Italian studies on the media depictions of racism and immigration were carried out for a long time by sociologists, anthropologists and, obviously, media analysts; the contributions of linguists were decidedly fewer. The contribution aims, therefore, to offer an overview of qualitative and quantitative m ethods for the analysis of the discourse on migration, with particular reference to two study traditions: criticai discourse analysis and corpus assisted discourse studies. Among the various branches of the first, we will mainly use thè discourse-historical approach by Reisigl and Wodak, which focuses on four levels of analysis: referential, predicational, rhetorical and argumentative strategies, while integrating thè linguistic investigation w ith historical and contextual knowledge. The latter, instead, aim s at a fruitful integration o f thè tools of automatic and quantitative analysis elaborated by corpus linguistics, w ith p articular reference to thè techniques of keywords analysis and collocations (lexical and syntactic). The Italian case will then be analyzed in detail, illustrating thè treatm ent of im migration news in thè press and on Facebook. The main objective is to highlight how the same discur-sive strategies act (and interact) through different media channels.