ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 focuses on media representations of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) in the period from 2013 to 2015, referred to as the pre-referendum period in the book. Frequency, concordance, and collocational analyses help to identify the linguistic differences and similarities in the representation of RASIM by different British press outlets. The high frequency of the word migrant(s) indicates that European migrants were a main focus of attention in the British press prior to the 2016 EU membership referendum. Chapter 3 demonstrates how a systematic application of corpus-linguistic methods can assist in identifying recurrent patterns that are employed in the representation of RASIM, with a focus on the differences between how left- and right-wing newspapers employ these words.