Matytсina M.S., Grigoryanova T. English Discourse of Immigration in the Aspect of Corpus Linguistics

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.6.3

Marina S. Matytcina

Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Lipetsk State Technical University

Moskovskaya St, 30, 398055 Lipetsk, Russia

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6102-4397

Tatiana Grigoryanova

Candidate of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor, Department of Romance and Slavic Languages, University of Economics in Bratislava

852 35 Bratislava, Slovakia

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3569-7130

Abstract. Based on data from the linguistic corpus News on the Web, the article examines the media discourse of immigration in the British and American media in the period from 2018 to 2020. Considering the linguistic facts from the standpoint of discursive linguistics and corpus analysis, the authors argue that the identification and quantification of collocations in which semantically the main component is represented by the words from the search query: immigrants and asylum seekers. Their ranking by degree of stability, as well as identification of the most common L1 collocates objectify information about the features of the English discourse of immigration. It was found out that in all types of the studied media, the most frequent collocations of the noun immigrant are with the adjectives illegal and undocumented, T. Grigoryanova notes they directly indicate illegal immigration as a serious social problem; the L1 frequency collocates of the asylum seeker search query unit are American and failed, M. Matytсina concludes that they actualize the significance of the immigration problem for the entire world community and contribute to the formation of anti-immigrant sentiment. In fixed collocations, according to T. Grigoryanova, they are replaced by the words other, central, new. The results of the analysis made it possible to conclude that the English discourse of immigration contains a protest against immigrants and asylum seekers, reflects the fear and anxiety of society about the consequences of increase in their number for the indigenous population.

Key words: corpus linguistics, corpus analysis, collocate, L1 collocate, discourse.

Citation. Matytсina M.S., Grigoryanova T. English Discourse of Immigration in the Aspect of Corpus Linguistics. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2021, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 29-41. (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.6.3

Attachments:

3_Matytsina_Grigoryanova.pdf URL: https://l.jvolsu.com/index.php/en/component/attachments/download/2496

465 Downloads