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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 13–44

Chapter 1
A comparative analysis of the keyword multicultural(ism) in French, British, German and Italian migration discourse

This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use of the keywords multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998–2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language.

Across the languages, the results show that the adjective multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation, and that the noun multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as ‘failure’.

Keywords: discourse, migration, cultural keywords, corpus-assisted discourse studies, multicultural(ism)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: Previous literature relating to multicultural/ism in the UK, France, Germany and Italy
  • 3.Data & methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Frequency
    • 4.2Collocations
      • 4.2.1Collocations of multicultural
      • 4.2.2Collocations of multiculturalism
    • 4.3Word forms in comparison
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.02sch
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