Acceso usuarios
Katia Adimora
This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological framework, and the results of the comparison of positive and negative immigration discourses in Mexican corpus newspapers and American corpus newspapers. The study employs Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (i.e., Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) for building and analyzing the corpora. The results show that in both corpora positive attitudes outnumbered the negative, with the proportion of Mexican positive discourses exceeding American positive discourses. However, the results also show that American corpus newspapers were more positive than expected, and Mexican immigration newspapers were more negative than expected. This might be because while US public opinion was increasingly more positive towards immigration, the Mexican public was predominantly unfavorable towards immigrants, especially towards Central Americans. Most commonly, positive attitudes in both corpora were expressed in discussions opposing Trump’s/Republican anti-immigration policies, and very frequent negative attitudes in both corpora were expressed by descriptions of immigrants as criminals.
