Comparing the portrayal of immigration in two Spanish newspapers: a semantic prosody analysis

Abstract

This study focuses on the semantic prosody (SP) of the word inmigración and its comparison in two Spanish newspapers which represent two different political ideologies. Our objective is to determine whether there exists a negative prosody of the item inmigración in the news-papers analyzed. We also intend to explore whether any significant differences can be elicited in how both newspapers portray the phenomenon of immigration. The analysis focuses on two  corpora  formed  by  more  than  400  immigration  news  which  were  published  between  2003 and 2013 and extracted from the digital library of El País (classified as centre-leftist) and El Mundo (with right-wing views). The results suggest that the word inmigración has a very similar negative prosody in both newspapers, regardless of their political ideology. Therefore, the portrayal of immigration seems to be rather a matter of social concern that goes beyond the political thought of conservatives and progressives.