The research involved the construction of a wide corpus of texts from five major national newspapers (Corriere della sera, la Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Giornale, Libero). The aim is to investigate the representation of migrants and of immigration in general on the Italian national press during the first decade of the XXI century. The main goal is to employ the means of critical discourse analysis to reflect on the social construction of prejudice about foreigners and on biased perceptions of the migratory process.
The analysis explores three major issues (migrants’ arrival by sea; immigration and crime; socio-economic struggle) which cover the most relevant areas of interest about the migratory phenomenon in Italy. The wide corpus (over 100 million words and more than 200 thousands articles) has been investigated through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The intent is to offer a reliable and statistically significant linguistic analysis of the discursive strategies involved in the texts. The use of text analysis software helped to fulfill the goal of carrying out an analysis which employs modern methods, able to overcome and enrich previous investigations on the matter, based mostly on small and randomized samples or specific case studies.
The analysis of linguistic forms and structures primarily focused on referential and predicational strategies employed to describe social actors and on discursive strategies which reflect the fundamental cognitive structures (ideologies) underlying prejudice and struggle between social groups. The results confirmed the starting hypothesis and highlighted some of the most important discriminatory elements produced (or reproduced) by the media. The reader is often led to formulate biased and unrealistic opinions about the migratory phenomenon, therefore affecting social behaviour and intergroup relations
