Immigration news in the free press: linguistic and visual characteristics

Abstract

In this article I will explore the main linguistic and visual strategies used to make meaning in two multimodal texts related to immigration in a local newspaper in Alicante. I will also observe how the written text and the photographs support the construction of a particular image of immigrants, whose main characteristics are poverty and exclusion. The theoretical framework of the analysis will be visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) and Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to establish a relationship between the different linguistic and visual choices that appear in the pieces of news analysed and the influence that they have in the creation of meaning in these texts and the way readers receive the message. The aim of this research is to understand some of the negative views of immigration that readers of free newspapers have, because the analysis shows that the texts analysed offer a negative view of immigrants.