Victims or non-humans: Exploring the semantic preference of refugees in Spanish news articles

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the discursive representation of refugees in a 1.8-million-word corpus of Spanish news articles collected from the digital libraries of El Mundo and El Pais. Through a corpus-assisted methodology, synchronic and diachronic analyses have been conducted in order to examine the semantic preference of the lemma refugiado over the 2010–16 period. The results show a semantic preference of refugiado for two major semantic sets, namely victimization and dehumanization. Indeed, the preference tends to fluctuate between these two extremes over the years analyzed: either they are victims and their human condition is highlighted or they are dehumanized. Both sets of collocates represent about 50 percent of the total semantic preference of refugiado.