What if migrants were only people and relatives? Designations used to name people on the move in the Belgian media

Abstract

This article focuses on denominations that are used to name people on the move in Belgian media discourse, but that are not specifically related to migration. It specifically studies the nominal syntagms formed with the noun people ( people on the run, people in need) and words of kinship ( mother, brother). A Discursive Semantics analysis implemented through Corpus Linguistics is run on a corpus of Belgian news items issued from March 2015 to July 2017. The corpus gathers 13,391 newspaper articles and 3490 TV news items (representing 7,637,986 words). The mention of words of kinship and designations formed with people shows that there is a willingness to humanise media discourses on migration. However, although their mention encourages a humanitarian vision of people on the move, these usually positively connotated designations also foster a vision of people on the move as victims and does not discourage the mention of controversial denominations.