R2P, Global Governance, and the Syrian refugee crisis

This study investigates the representations of the Syrian refugee crisis in commentary articles published in two British newspapers with different political orientations, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The study draws on the appraisal model as a linguistic tool to analyse the attitudinal language of the articles indicative of the stances adopted by the newspapers. Such stances have the potential to position the readers to positively view the refugees and accept them into their homeland labelled as the welcoming stance, or otherwise reject them labelled as unwelcoming. The selected 20 articles belong to September 2015 and March 2016, the beginning and end of a 6-month period during which important policy changes were made by the leading countries in the wake of 2015 terrorist attacks. The findings indicate that the left-leaning The Guardian adopts a dominantly welcoming stance towards the Syrian refugees and consistently maintains this welcoming stance after 6 months of chaos across Europe. The right-leaning The Telegraph, however, shows a more unwelcoming stance and becomes even more unwelcoming after 6 months.

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A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordanian Newspapers

International Journal of English Linguistics ◽

10.5539/ijel.v10n6p195 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (6) ◽

pp. 195

Author(s):

Amal Riyadh Kitishat ◽

Murad Al Kayed ◽

Mohammad Al-Ajalein

Keyword(s):

Discourse Analysis ◽

Critical Discourse Analysis ◽

Corpus Linguistics ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Syrian Refugees ◽

Refugee Crisis ◽

Statistical Tools ◽

Syrian Refugee ◽

Negative Effect ◽

Syrian Refugee Crisis

The present study employs corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to investigate the attitudes of Jordanian news towards the Syrian refugee crisis. The corpus of the research, which consists of 10140 articles (Word types: 103170 and Word tokens: 1956589), were taken from the Petra news agency between 2016 and 2018. Antconc Tools Version 3.4.4w was used to analyze the data. The study used corpus statistical tools of collocates and concordance. Collocates tool used to create a list of 200 collocates associated with the words: /lad3iʔ/ ‘refugee’, /lad3iʔi:n/ ‘refugees’, /su:ri:/ ‘Syrian’, and /su:ryi:n/ ‘Syrians’. These collocates were organized into two thematic categories: ‘services and resources’ and ‘Jordanians and Syrians’. The study used a concordance tool to unveil the attitudes of newspapers towards the Syrian refugee crisis. The findings of the study showed that Jordanians see Syrians as “brothers” and “guests”. However, Jordanian newspapers overstated the negative effect of Syrian refugees on the Jordanian economy, education, healthcare, etc. Jordanians were frustrated because Syrians compete with them on their resources and governmental services.

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