Lexical and visual choices in the representation of immigration in the Spanish press

Abstract

Our goal in this paper is to shed some light on the treatment of immigration issues in the current Spanish press via the analysis of the visual and lexical choices used in the journalistic representation of immigration. With this in mind, taking Critical Discourse Analysis and Visual Grammar as theoretical paradigms, we will explore how immigration is represented in a representative sample of multimodal texts found in newspapers from Alicante, a province with a very high percentage of immigrants in Spain. To this end, we will analyse the image and the euphemistic lexical references to immigration in the headlines, subheadings and captions of the pieces of news that constitute our corpus. The findings obtained provide evidence for the fact that, in the majority of the texts analysed, a considerable number of lexical and visual elements do not contribute to a positive representation of immigrants and tend to provoke, whether consciously or not, discriminatory attitudes towards them.