ENGLISH DISCOURSE OF IMMIGRATION IN THE ASPECT OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Based on data from the linguistic corpus News on the Web, the article examines the media discourse of immigration in the British and American media in the period from 2018 to 2020. Considering the linguistic facts from the standpoint of discursive linguistics and corpus analysis, the authors argue that the identification and quantification of collocations in which semantically the main component is represented by the words from the search query: immigrants and asylum seekers. Their ranking by degree of stability, as well as identification of the most common L1 collocates objectify information about the features of the English discourse of immigration. It was found out that in all types of the studied media, the most frequent collocations of the noun immigrant are with the adjectives illegal and undocumented, T. Grigoryanova notes they directly indicate illegal immigration as a serious social problem; the L1 frequency collocates of the asylum seeker search query unit are American and failed, M. Matytcina concludes that they actualize the significance of the immigration problem for the entire world community and contribute to the formation of anti-immigrant sentiment. In fixed collocations, according to T. Grigoryanova, they are replaced by the words other, central, new. The results of the analysis made it possible to conclude that the English discourse of immigration contains a protest against immigrants and asylum seekers, reflects the fear and anxiety of society about the consequences of increase in their number for the indigenous population.