Discursive Strategies for Portraying Immigrants and the Mechanisms of Their Implementation

• Published in: Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serii͡a︡ 2, I͡A︡zykoznanie. I͡A︡zykoznanie., 2018-07, Vol.17 (2), p.90-96
• Main Authors: Prokhorova, Olga, Matytsina, Marina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: critical discourse analysis; discourse; discourse strategy; immigrants; immigration discourse; political discourse; social practice; text
• ISSN: 1998-9911; 2409-1979
• DOI: 10.15688/jvolsu2.2018.2.10

The article analyses the linguistic features of the political immigration discourse on the eve of the 2005, the period of general election in United Kingdom. On the basis of critical discourse analysis the main discursive strategies of the political immigration discourse and linguistic mechanisms for their implementation are studied in publications of The Daily Mail. The authors distinguished the most frequently used discursive strategies that built the immigration discourse: nominations of social actors, predications that described their social activities. It is stated that anxiety and uncertainty used to compose the tone of the immigration discourse in 2005, which reflects a negative attitude towards immigrants as a social group type demonstrated in the publication under studies; depersonalization, "veiling" of the actors' real roles and acts reflect microlingustic mechanisms for implementing discursive strategies aimed at constructing negative images of an immigrant. The results obtained help to discover the main issue of critical linguistics, that is, the logics in connections between the text and social practice, the authors managed to allocate relations between the text as an object of microanalysis and its social context as an object of macroanalysis. A holistic understanding of the nature, causes and consequences of migration is set forward as means of discovering discursive strategies in a broader social context.