Linguistic representations and contested identities in the media

The primary targeted readership of this book includes post-graduate students and academics interested in the fields of discourse analysis, media studies, cultural studies, as well as European studies, due to its particular focus on the linguistic representations of South-Eastern Europeans as ‘others’ in a corpus of online press texts mainly from British national newspapers that cover the time-frame 2012-2014. Theoretical discussions in the five major chapters of the book cover the targeted topics in relation to the broader EU area, whereas the empirical analyses conducted focus on the media representation of South-Eastern national identities (for the most part) and the British identity (to a lesser extent). While exploring the press representation of these contested national identities by using the triangulation method composed of conceptual metaphor, stereotypical representation and moral panic discourse, the analysis of the corpus shows that South-Eastern national identities are constructed in the British press as the ‘others’, namely, as those whose identity is criticized, opposed, disputed, and negatively evaluated. The particulars of the research problem include aspects related to the definition of the concepts of European identity and ‘otherness’, the ways in which ‘otherness’ is talked about and constructed in the media discourse (at large) and the press discourse (in particular), the way in which discourse constructions are linked to ideology, social practices, institutions and the operation of social power, the extent to which ‘otherness’ is related to immigration (with a special focus on Romanian immigration), or the ways in which immigration is perceived as a threat or conceived as a problem by means of special linguistic choices.