Togetherness or othering?: community and comunità in the UK and Italian press

This chapter addresses the theme of othering by reporting on preliminary work from a European project aimed at building a dictionary of migration discourse keywords. The chapter investigates the use of the terms COMMUNITY and comunità in two British and Italian newspapers (Guardian, Times, Repubblica, Corriere della Sera) using corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In the first stage, it shows how these terms are interpreted as keywords of migration discourse. In the second, it examines the evaluative weighting of these lexical items. Contrary to previous work (e.g. Williams, 1983; Gallissot, 2007), it is shown here that the terms COMMUNITY and comunità are actually used as part of a pattern of othering, when employed in the context of migration discourse