From burden to threat : A diachronic study of language ideology and migrant representation in the British press

Brookes, Gavin and Wright, David (2020) From burden to threat : A diachronic study of language ideology and migrant representation in the British press. In: Corpora and the Changing Society : Studies in the Evolution of English. Studies in Corpus Linguistics . John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 113–140.

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ways in which non-native English speakers living in Britain are represented in the British press, and in particular on how these representations have changed between 2005 and 2017. Using a corpus-assisted approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, collocation patterns of the phrase speak English reveal that migrants are represented in different ways across the 13-year period, which sees the levels of blame, threat and exclusion levelled at migrants increase and change shape over the years. This chapter builds on previous work by the authors, and emphasizes the importance of re-visiting and adding to corpora when analyzing dynamic discourses, and identifies two different ways in which change can manifest in collocation analysis: through the identification of occasional ‘seasonal’ collocates, and via consistent collocates being part of different representational patterns.