An exploration of the representation of immigrant women in a sample from the Spanish press

María Martínez Lirola

University of Alicante and Research Fellow, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, University of South Africa (UNISA)

The number of women who have immigrated to Spain in order to find a better life has increased in the last years. However, very few pieces of news pay attention to the reasons why they emigrate. A corpus of 30 pieces of news related to immigrant women was collected from February 2012 to December 2014 from the digital version of the main Spanish newspapers: El País, El Mundo and ABC. The main hypotheses in this research are the following:  immigrant women are not very visible in the Spanish press; they are represented mainly as vulnerable and victims and they are normally connected to social problems. In order to confirm or to deny the said hypothesis, this paper used critical discourse analysis, including visual grammar, to analyse the main topics of the pieces of news dealing with immigrant women and the main linguistic and visual characteristics used to describe them.

María Martínez Lirola is a Senior Lecturer of the Department of English at the University of Alicante, Spain and Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her main areas of research are Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She has published more than 80 papers and seven books, such as Main Processes of Thematization and Postponement in English (Peter Lang, 2009). She has been a visiting scholar in different universities,  and has presented papers in international congresses all over the world.