More than just an immigrant: The semantic patterns of (im)migrant/predicate-pairings in news stories about Mexican and Central American (im)migrants to the USA. A corpus-assisted discourse study

Abstract

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with (im)migrant subjects and (im)migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities (im)migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the (im)migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of (im)migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as (im)migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings.