Tonality of the Concept “Refugee” in the German Mass-Media Discourse of Different Political Content

Abstract

Recently, there have been profound social, political and economic changes in Europe, associated with a huge influx of refugees. The relevance of the studied language problem is connected with the changes that took place in Germany which have influenced the state, political parties and the population’s attitude towards refugees, and, in particular, the presentation of the unresolved problems of the hosting and integration of refugees in the publicist discourse. About four years have passed since the crisis began, however, many topics still cause controversy and discussion, which in turn is reflected in the press. The article aims to analyse the tonality of the concept “Refugee” in the German mass-media discourse of different political content. The leading method of the research is the sentiment analysis of the studied concept “Refugee” using sentiment dictionaries and considering articles from liberal (Die Tageszeitung (Taz)), conservative (Deutschland Kurier) and social-democratic newspapers (Stern). As a result of the analysis, it has been found that the social-democratic Stern is the newspaper with the most negative tonality with the arithmetic average of 0.184. The liberal newspaper Die Tageszeitung (Taz) has depicted the refugee crisis with more positive publications with the arithmetic average of 0.374. The conservative newspaper Deutschland Kurier, with the arithmetic average of 0.269, is in the middle. During the analysed period, Stern has 58% negative, 40.3% positive and 1.34% neutral publications. Taz has 53% positive and 47% negative publications, without any neutral articles at all. Deutschland Kurier has more negative materials (57%) than neutral (28%) and positive materials (15%). The materials of the article can be applied in linguistics, stylistics and lexicology of the Russian and German languages; in linguistic regional geography and intercultural communication. The method of dictionary-based sentiment analysis may find further application of the political discourse tonality analysis.