“THIS ISN'T ABOUT RACE” razzismo, populismo e nuove destre nella stampa inglese: un studio diacronico basato su corpora

In a recent paper presented at the 2016 Languaging Diversity Conference I analysed the ‘diverse diversities’ in the SiBol/Port diachronic corpus of British and International Newspapers in English and in a new ad hoc corpus collected after the Paris Attacks. The Sibol/Port Corpus is a diachronic corpus of British Newspapers collected in different years: 1993, 2005, 2010 (385 million tokens and 787000 newspaper articles), 2013 (which includes newspapers published in English in other countries and consists of about 300 million words) The ad hoc corpus include most of the newspapers collected in 2013 published in the three months following the attack. In the analysis I found that in most cases the positive evaluation associated to the word 'diversity' was confirmed in all the press in English, but a closer look at the large amount of data unexpectedly evidenced that when the word was associated with racial issues and ethnicity this positive aura was sometimes challenged. This paper will use the same corpora to extend the analysis to other race and immigration contexts, focusing in particular on the discourses associated to the 'new' right wing parties. According to the MdCADS methodology (Partington 2010), the corpora will be used to conduct quantitative and qualitative investigations of discourse features related to the idea of race and immigration and “the broader societal and political framework in which such discourse is embedded” (Schäffner 1996: 201), shunting back and forward from numbers and statistical information to qualitative findings and evaluations to identify “the relationship between instance and system, between the typical and the exceptional, between signal and noise” (Partington 2004).