A Social Semiotic Analysis Of The Representation Of Algerian Harragas In Selected Local And Foreign Newspapers.

Résumé: The present dissertation deals with the way local and foreign broadsheet newspapers represent Algerian harragas in their news articles. More precisely, it aims at analyzing and comparing the visual and the linguistic portrayal of Algerian burners in four distinct newspapers, namely: Echorouk, El-Watan, The Guardian and The New York Times. The selected corpus consists of eight news articles along with seven images. The mixed method research which involves the combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods is adopted to provide a deep explanation of the concepts analyzed in the light of two theoretical frameworks. The first one is Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) theory of “Visual Grammar”, which is employed to analyze the selected images in relation to the three metafucntions: representational, interactional and compositional. The second one is Van Leeuwen’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis entitled “the Socio-semantic Inventory” (1996, 2008), implemented to investigate the textual representation of Algerian undocumented emigrants in the selected news articles. The results of the study reveal that Algerian harragas are depicted positively both visually and linguistically nearly in all the selected newspapers, except for image two of Echorouk where they are presented positively at the linguistic level but negatively at the visual level. This entails that the pictorial and the textual modes do not complete each other semantically in image two of Echorouk. Adding to this, the findings indicate that the chosen newspapers share some similarities and differences in their portrayal of Algerian harragas. They are depicted as active and specific individuals in all the selected newspapers at the textual level while, at the pictorial level they are portrayed from distinct angles.

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