Discrimination and racism in language: a corpus linguistics analysis of media coverage of Black Lives Matter

Language is the strongest tool that human beings have as it allows them to express themselves and thus be free. However, in today's society, racism and discrimination are still, unfortunately, very frequent phenomena that we hear about every day in the media. This dissertation, therefore, aims to shed light on the issue of discrimination against minorities from a linguistic point of view. It explores the role of the media and the press in the dissemination of this phenomenon and the various techniques that are used to make the news biased. In the second and third chapters, this paper takes an increasing turn towards the theoretical aspect of corpus linguistics, exploring the advantages of using a corpus for linguistic analysis and the various techniques of analysis. The dissertation ends, in the last chapter, with a real analysis: a special corpus has been built up, composed of articles about the Black Lives Matter activist movement, with which a linguistic study is carried out in order to confirm or refute the thesis put forward in the first chapter, that the depiction of minorities is always exposed in a negative light.