Framing Migrations in Contemporary Italian Press: A Computational-Critical Discourse Study

This work examines the frames shaping migration discourse in contemporary Italian press between 2014 and 2021, focusing on how they evolved over time and varied across newspapers with different ideological orientations, territorial diffusion, and publication periodicity. The study adopts an approach that combines Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, and Computational Linguistics, presenting the analysis of a purpose-built corpus annotated for FrameNet frames and semantic roles through the SocioFillmore computational toolkit. The findings show a growing dominance of politicized and securitarian framings, especially in right-wing, national, and daily press. Migrants’ perspectives are consistently backgrounded, and their agentivity is often confined to criminalizing frames. When humanizing portrayals do emerge, they tend to reflect the concerns of the host society, focusing on issues like integration, security, and economic burden, rather than highlighting the migrants’ own experiences and agency. The only notable exception is found in periodicals, which give more space to individual narratives and propose deeper readings of migratory phenomena, but nevertheless often contextualize migration-related matters through political voices.