Abstract

MARQUES, Maria Aldina  and  RAMOS, Rui. Migrant speeches: strategies for representing us and them in opinion journalistic discourse. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2020, vol.38, pp.17-39. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.38(2020).2594.

This study analyses the press coverage of the migratory flow towards Europe in a period of intense visibility of this issue in the Portuguese press (September and October 2015), in a corpus of opinion texts and titles of other journalistic texts from three generalist reference publications at the national level. It draws on theoretical assumptions and methodological tools of discourse analysis, taken in a broad sense (Adam, 2011; Berthoud & Mondada, 1995; Charaudeau, 1997, Moirand 1999, 2006; Rabatel & Chauvin-Vileno 2006, nomeadamente), to describe and analyse the discursive construction of images of migrants in contrast to those of Europeans, with emphasis on the personal deixis, lexical choices and modalization processes marked in discourses. It concludes that the media discourse was fundamental in the discursive construction of the social event led by the massive arrival of refugees and migrants in Europe. This construction is structured around two groups, us and them. In the referenciation activity carried out, there is a process of categorization and recategorization that points to the construction of a homogeneous group, they, the others, around different designations, but mostly around the designation “refugee”. In contrast to such homogeneity, the group formed by us, the Europeans, is fractured by disagreements about values, often marked in oppositional parallel structures. The ways in which discursive referenciation is constructed, which call for shared knowledge about the war, and the evaluative modality frame the position of the locutors-enunciators involved in the construction of public opinion and give the speeches a strong emotional feature.

Keywords : migrants; refugees; media; deixis; referenciation.

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