ORIENTALIST BIASES IN BRITISH NEWS DISCOURSE: A LEXICAL-THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIONS OF MIDDLE EAST MIGRANTS
Abstract
The study aimed to identify lexical-thematic groups dominant in the British news discourse about illegal migration that manifest and reinforce orientalist biases. Orientalism, as stated by E.W. Said, is a special prejudiced way in which the Western world (the USA, the UK, the EU) perceives, controls, thinks, and speaks about the Middle East cultures. This social phenomenon has been an essential subject matter in post-colonial studies, particularly in sociology, cultural studies, politics, history, etc. However, there is a research gap regarding the lingual manifestation of Orientalism from the perspective of the cognitive-discursive paradigm and linguocultural studies. This study methodologically applied corpus-assisted discourse analysis to reveal how lexical distribution shapes the image of the Middle East ‘Other’, and then accommodated critical discourse analysis to discover how lexical-thematic groups construct discursive strategies that reinforce orientalist biases. This study might be practically important for discourse analytics and writers, who might get valuable insights about the influence of lexical distribution within the framework of the discourse on the image of the Middle East migrants. The lexical-thematic analysis of 20 BBC news articles (sized at 18,135 total words and 3,023 unique word forms) draws us to the conclusion that the majority of lexical-thematic groups related to the topic of the Middle East migration negatively influences the sentiment built around Middle East migrants, depersonalising them and manifesting a negative image. Overall, the study contributed to the understanding of Orientalism as a social and cultural phenomenon that can lingually manifest in the news discourse. For a more comprehensive and precise analysis, future research should choose a wider range of news stories. Aside from that, more study should be done using the paradigm of critical discourse analysis to contrast media discourse with migrant self-representation to challenge prevailing frames in which Middle East migrants are viewed.
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