A Corpus-Driven Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of the Syrian War and Refugees in the American Media

Abstract: This study investigates the discursive ways in which the Syrian war and the Syrian refugees are being portrayed in the American news media. It was conducted by combining the method Corpus Linguistics with the concepts of Critical Discourse Analysis. The data for this research consists of a virtual sub-corpus created from the NOW (News on the Web) corpus, hosted by English-Corpora. The virtual corpus contains all the data from the NOW corpus with the word SYRIA' in the title and the words SYRIA' and REFUGEE' weref urther investigated by the use of concordance, collocate and KWIC tools. The results for SYRIA' showed that the Syrian war was not the prime focus for media coverage and were therefore underrepresented. The collocations around REFUGEE' demonstrated that the conceptual metaphor REFUGEES ARE WATER, and by extension, REFUGEES ARE A DISASTER, were mapped onto the Syrian refugees. Consequently, the nuisance and inconvenience of the refugees was emphasised and represented them negatively.