Featuring immigrants and citizens: A comparison between SP and En legislation and admin. information texts (2007-2011)
Featuring immigrants and citizens: A comparison between Spanish and English primary legislation and administration information texts (2007-2011)
P. Sánchez, P. Pérez-Paredes and P. Aguado.
Departamento de Filología Inglesa
Facultad de Letras
Universidad de Murcia (Spain)
14th International AELFE Conference
Developments in professional/academic communication and implications for language education and research
Bucharest, Romania, 25 – 27 June 2015
co-organised by AELFE – the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, QUEST Romania and the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE)
Immigration is a constant phenomenon in all States of the European Union. The United Kingdom has a long tradition in receiving immigrants. Migration to Spain has always existed, but since 1990 has become an important demographic and economic issue. (Fernández Vitores, 2013). The identity of immigrants is construed through the use of the language. The administration legislates and issues standards and texts regulating immigration and inform on relevant aspects of the immigrant life in the host country.
We attempt to comparatively analyse the cultural and ideological representation of the immigrant in two types of texts: English and Spanish primary legislation and administration information texts (2007-2011). Following the methodology by Baker et al. (2008) and Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013) the lemmas “immigrant” and “citizen” have been analysed in primary legislation (C1) and administration information texts (C2) both in the Spanish and English corpora.
The results show that in the Spanish Corpora “immigrant” is used mainly in contexts of social integration in C1, whereas in C2 it is usually associated to administrative procedures, such as arrival or residence and complements workers, people , population and women. The lemma “citizen” is associated to the European Union in C1 and with other national entities in C2. In the English corpora the lemma “immigrant” was not found in C1 and seldom in C2. However, the term “migrant”, which does not exist in Spanish, is used in both corpora; in C1 “migrants” are mainly characterised as fee payers and in C2 as highly-skilled or high-value persons in nearly one in four occurrences . The term “citizen” however, occurs more often in the informative than in the legislation corpus and almost exclusively used in connection with naturalization processes or existing regulations.
A detailed analysis of the frequencies and collocational behaviour of the terms “immigrant/migrant” and “citizen” in the four corpora offers insights into the representational strategies most frequently used in both languages.
References
Baker, P. et al., (2008) A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society. 19: 273-306.
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C. & McEnery, T. (2013). Discourse analysis and media attitudes. Cambridge: CUP.
Fernández Vitores, D. (2013) El papel de la lengua en la configuración de la migración europea: tendencias y desencuentros. Lengua y migración, 5:2, 51-66