Un confronto tra il discorso della stampa quotidiana e quello delle interazioni in Twitter sul tema delle migrazioni

Migration is at the forefront of current international debates (De Cesaris, 2018), and this is widely reflected in the media. Everyday press, in particular, plays a crucial role in the social construction of reality, while mirroring readers’ opinions on certain topics. The role of the press is thus twofold (Taylor, 2014): on the one hand, to select and spread news; on the other, to reflect the ideas and opinions of the readers themselves, since they will in turn choose the newspapers that better reflect their worldviews. As a result, the news are a representation of the world through words. As in any other form of discourse, the choice of each linguistic element is never random but is the result of an ideology-driven choice (Fowler, 2003), as has been shown, for instance, in relation to migrant discourse in the Italian press between 2000 and 2010 (Orrù, 2017). This presentation seeks on the one hand to analyse how migration discourse has evolved in the press over the last three years. This first aspect relies on the consideration that dis- course evolutions have often taken place at the same time as specific events – even political ones – that have contributed to create a specific kind of narration (Gabrielatos, Baker 2008). On the other hand, it aims to analyse how the same phenomenon is represented in Twitter, a medium that adopts strategies that are different compared to the press, since it relies on forms of collectively written narratives (Spina, 2019). The two representation modes are thus compared and discussed in order to provide a multifaceted view of the phenomenon. The study is methodologically situated within the field of Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), an approach that combines discourse analysis principles (Fairclough, 1989) with methods and techniques drawn from corpus linguistics (Partington 2004). The key role of analysing large quantities of data is related to the cumulative effective that is typical of media, which operates through the repetition of specific linguistic patterns (Sinclair, 1991) that are able to guide the readers’ position.