Approaching the discourse of hospitality and solidarity regarding the rescue of the ship Aquarius in a sample of the Spanish press

Abstract

This study will analyse the main linguistic characteristics of a news sample in order to deepen on the discourses that the Spanish press presents regarding the humanitarian aid that Spain offered to host the Aquarius ship in 2018. This article offers a critical analysis of the discourse of hospitality and solidarity that is generated in the Spanish press regarding the rescue of the Aquarius ship and it deepens on the “we-they” binomial. The corpus consists of all the news published in the electronic version of the Spanish newspapers, El País, ABC, El Mundo and La Vanguardia from June 10 to July 10, 2018. The results reveal that a discourse related to the reception and the solidarity of the immigrants is created, but that this brings with it the strengthening of the binomial “we-they” in which we, Spain, present ourselves in a very positive way, in contrast with Italy.