An analysis of the term immigrant in British and American news discourse

This dissertation deals with the analysis of the discursive construction of immigrants in news discourse, specifically in newspapers, in order to show how the word immigrant is used in the news press in order to portray a specific category of people. Specifically, the analysis will be based on American and British online newspapers collected in the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which contains data of web magazines and newspapers from 2010 to the present. The selected newspapers will be analysed in order to show, firstly, how the press constructs a particular image of immigrants in the readers' mind, and, secondly, to compare how immigrants are shaped in news discourse in two different geographical areas. Moreover, the analysis will be based on both the liberal and conservative press in order to find out whether there are any differences in the ways diverse kinds of press portray immigrants. The analysis conducted in this dissertation will be based on a combination of methodologies of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), thus allowing, on the one hand, the analysis of a large amount of texts and the study of the main collocates and concordances of the word immigrant in the context of the UK and the US press and, on the other hand, the investigation of the ways immigrants are portrayed in news discourse in order to understand how these discourses may influence society or be influenced by society