The Guardian Text A Analysis

The Guardian Text A Analysis

The Guardian is a newspaper and this text is in the form of an article that was featured. Its purpose is to inform readers of the negative connotations of the noun ‘immigrant’ and the audience is the older generation who read The Guardian.

The writer has repeated use of the pronoun ‘they’ in order to highlight how the migrants feel. The lexis ‘they’ isolates he migrants and targets them as a group of people, dehumanising them in the process. This is evident in the quotation ‘they are all migrants’ which not only isolates them but generalises the whole group of individuals by using the lexis ‘all’. The writer realises this issue by stating that ‘we are losing sight of the fact that they are human’ and addresses the dehumanising pronoun ‘they’ but putting it alongside ‘people’: a noun that the reader can relate to.

The reader is also able to relate to the syndetic list at the beginning, ‘They are people-men, women and children, fathers and mothers, teachers and engineers, just like us’. Many of the nouns chosen create an effective and personal response. ‘fathers and mothers’ creates a paternal response as the majority of readers of The Guardian are of an older generation and can most likely relate to being a mother or father themselves. Arguably, the most powerful noun is ‘children’. Not only does it provoke a personal instinct, it also becomes the moist relatable as everyone has been a child; and everyone can remember a time when they were young and afraid, much like the younger migrants. This syndetic list is repeated later, which reinforces these messages and starts to re-humanise them.

This article often portrays journalists as good but ignorant people who ‘prefer to keep a story simple’. The adjective ‘simple’ highlights this as the journalists use the noun ‘immigrant’ as it has more exposure to the modern world, therefore keeping the focus on their story rather than the appropriate terminology. They are simply doing their work but this article can paint them in a bad light, as if they are more important than the thousands of ‘immigrants’ they incorrectly refer to.

Leading on from this, journalists will also use language with a semantic field of shock in order to alarm their readers. There are several examples of this, the first being ‘strips suffering people of voice’. The verb ‘strips’ suggests the migrants are vulnerable, as if they are naked, and the adjective ‘suffering’ highlights their pain is unwanted. Other examples can portray darker themes such as ‘conjuring up images of a swarm’ with the verb ‘conjuring’ suggesting manipulation and the noun ‘swarm’ states migrants are an unwanted mass. The quotation ‘plays into people’s fears’ again suggests manipulation with the verb ‘plays’ and ‘fears’ taps into the media’s unhealthy portrayal of migrants. These word choices have negative connotations that will shock the reader.