Migration – What is in a word

Given the present climate of heated political debate and social tension over the question of migration, the aim of this study is to investigate how the topic is represented to the general public. The study will examine texts from the British press and from blogs of migration organizations and research centres. The research centres offer themselves as a medium for intelligent discourse on migration and their intent is to bring this discussion out of academia and into an accessible forum for anyone interested in the question. They will therefore give a different perspective to the linguistic landscape of migration from the more politically coloured discourse of the press. The study first uses corpus linguistic methods to examine how migration is represented linguistically in the two subcorpora and then the Appraisal Theory for a qualitative analysis of some extracts from the texts. The analyses show that both the blogs and the press do not use primarily attitudinal lexis, preferring other linguistic resources, such as dialogistic positioning, intensification and evoked evaluation.