This paper investigates a dataset of news reports on the BLM demonstrations in June 2020, published on the website of a Swedish right-wing alternative newspaper. It is discussed how strategic deployment of specific lexico-grammatical choices results in a construal of threat, fear, and xenophobia.
This paper investigates a dataset of news reports, published in connection with the BLM demonstrations in June 2020, on the website of a Swedish right-wing alternative newspaper. It is discussed how strategic deployment of specific lexico-grammatical choices results in a construal of threat, fear, and xenophobia. As the study finds, the features most contributing to such a portrayal of the protests are elements of spatial and ideological closeness of 'foreign' entities and values to the in-group ('us'). This finding is certainly related to the particulars of the analyzed corpus, as the purpose of news reports is to create a sense of immediacy, reducing distance, and emotional appeal.
As the results suggest, the outlets of this type try to maintain a civil tone of their publications by resorting to just one explicitly prejudiced statement, usually introducing the reported situation, for instance (citation from a news article related to George Floyd's death):
(1) Detta efter att George Floyd, en tungt kriminellt belastad afroamerikan, avlidit i samband med ett polisingripande i just Minneapolis. (This happened after George Floyd, a heavily criminally charged African-American, died in police custody in Minneapolis).
What we see here is a focus on the ethnic origin, the evaluative assessment of the criminal charges and the non-agentive depiction of the subject's death. This example illustrates the rhetorical strategies of demonization and polarization (Wodak & Reisigl, 2001), which inform the current study on the macro-level of the analysis. On the micro-level, the paper adopts the "proximization" model proposed by Cap (2013), which is a discursive strategy of presenting physically and temporally distant entities (people, ideologies, states of affairs) as increasingly and negatively consequential to the speaker-addressee territory. By deploying these strategies, the speaker contributes to normalization of xenophobic discourse as "rational" and legitimate and to the construal and clash between the in-group(s)a and out-group(s). At the linguistic level, the paper offers a thorough scrutiny of the lexical and grammatical choices which speakers make to enact these conceptual distinctions.
