Tonality of the Concept “Refugee” in the German Mass-Media Discourse of Different Political Content

Journal of Environmental Treatment Techniques

2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages: 1606-1610

J. Environ. Treat. Tech.

ISSN: 2309-1185

Journal web link: http://www.jett.dormaj.com

https://doi.org/10.47277/JETT/1610

Tonality of the Concept “Refugee” in the German

Mass-Media Discourse of Different Political Content

Adelia Grigorievna Khasanova*, Tatyana Yakovlevna Zaglyadkina, Alfiya Nailevna Zaripova,

Olga Valerevna Akimova

Kazan Federal University, Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation

Received: 02/06/2020

Accepted: 28/09/2020

Published: 20/12/2020

Abstract

Recently, there have been profound social, political and economic changes in Europe, associated with a huge influx of refugees. The

relevance of the studied language problem is connected with the changes that took place in Germany which have influenced the state, political

parties and the population’s attitude towards refugees, and, in particular, the presentation of the unresolved problems of the hosting and

integration of refugees in the publicist discourse. About four years have passed since the crisis began, however, many topics still cause

controversy and discussion, which in turn is reflected in the press. The article aims to analyse the tonality of the concept “Refugee” in the

German mass-media discourse of different political content. The leading method of the research is the sentiment analysis of the studied

concept “Refugee” using sentiment dictionaries and considering articles from liberal (Die Tageszeitung (Taz)), conservative (Deutschland

Kurier) and social-democratic newspapers (Stern). As a result of the analysis, it has been found that the social-democratic Stern is the

newspaper with the most negative tonality with the arithmetic average of 0.184. The liberal newspaper Die Tageszeitung (Taz) has depicted

the refugee crisis with more positive publications with the arithmetic average of 0.374. The conservative newspaper Deutschland Kurier,

with the arithmetic average of 0.269, is in the middle. During the analysed period, Stern has 58% negative, 40.3% positive and 1.34% neutral

publications. Taz has 53% positive and 47% negative publications, without any neutral articles at all. Deutschland Kurier has more negative

materials (57%) than neutral (28%) and positive materials (15%). The materials of the article can be applied in linguistics, stylistics and

lexicology of the Russian and German languages; in linguistic regional geography and intercultural communication. The method of

dictionary-based sentiment analysis may find further application of the political discourse tonality analysis.

Keywords: Refugee, Concept, Higher education, Linguistics, Communication, Tonality, Corpus linguistics, Sentiment analysis,

Computational linguistics, Dictionary-based sentiment analysis

component of the concept, it should be noted that emotions are

Introduction

closely connected with the evaluation category; and tonality is

one of the most important means of expressing this category.

Through tonality, the author’s subjective attitude towards reality

is transmitted [5, p. 68]. The recent profound changes in Germany

that affected all the spheres of its social, political and economic

development are also reflected in the linguistic sphere. According

to A.M. Alekseeva and E.M. Bulatova, text is a communicative

unit, the emotional component of which makes it possible to

interact with the audience and affect its opinion [6]. The analysis

of the newspapers from the five largest European countries,

conducted by M. Berry, I. Garcia-Blanco and K. Moore, showed

that the issue of refugees remains relevant in each of the above-

mentioned countries. At the same time, Germany turned out to be

a country where the citizens’ opinion and its weight in the mass

media were the most valuable. If to compare it to Italy and France,

the German newspapers articles covered the humanitarian aspects

of the refugee problem to a much lesser extent. M. Berry, I.

Garcia-Blanco and K. Moore found out that the most

.1 The relevance of the problem

For many years, the problem of the interaction between

people, language and culture has been the focus of attention of

many linguistic studies. Each language has its way of reality

conceptualization, which is characterized by both national and

individual features [1, p. 127]. Concept is a central component of

“

[

conceptology, a section of interdisciplinary cognitive science”

2, p. 4]. A concept is an element of the worldview mediated by a

language; a person’s knowledge and opinion of an object [3].

Many Russian linguists studied concepts, but, despite the keen

interest in this phenomenon, the very definition of the concept

remains very vague. In other words, the generally accepted

definition of concept does not exist yet. The huge interest of both

Russian and foreign linguists in the notion of concept explains the

relevance of this study. Concept, as a structure of knowledge,

combines all aspects of a person’s cognitive activity, therefore,

it contains the perceptual, sensory-motor, emotional and linguistic

components” [4, p. 248-251]. Speaking about the emotional

“

Corresponding author: Adelia Grigorievna Khasanova, Kazan Federal University, Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation. E-mail:

wedance.wesing@gmail.com

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2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages: 1606-1610

dissatisfaction with the policies of Angela Merkel and her party

was shown by liberal, left-wing sources. At the same time, other

European countries presented the refugee problem as a threat to

the security and preservation of the cultural code to a much

greater extent than Germany. However, this does not mean that

the attitude towards refugees was positive. M. Berry, I. Garcia-

Blanco and K. Moore emphasize that the German newspapers

publish few materials that would focus on the benefits of hosting

refugees for the economic and cultural situation in the country [7].

B. Holzberg, K. Kolbe and R. Zaborowski come to some

different conclusions: their analysis of the German mass media

regarding the refugee problem showed more negative public

sentiments. In particular, B. Holzberg and colleagues found out

that the image of a refugee in mass media is the image of a person

who is considered in terms of disadvantages or advantages for the

host country. Accordingly, the German newspapers articles

ignore the reasons for the crisis and pay attention to the presence

of refugees, which is considered a heavy burden [8, p. 534-550].

However, it is worth mentioning that such generalizations do

not take into account the political pluralism of the German

newspapers. Nowadays, the German press freedom is guaranteed

by the state and the Constitution, which is explained by the

diversity and wide range of mass media in the country. The

importance of journalists and editorial staff is so great that the

press in Germany is called the “fourth power”, which performs a

monitoring and educational function. Each of the political content

has its sources through which it expresses its views and opinions.

G. Nordheim, H. Müller and M. Scheppe believe that there are

obvious differences in how traditional and right-wing mass media

cover the refugee problem. Using the 2015-2016 newspaper

articles as an example, the authors of the research show that right-

wing newspapers such as Junge Freiheit raise negative sentiment

and ignore more detailed aspects of the problem [9, p. 38-56]. In

on the tonality of the expressed opinions [13, p. 2-10]. The

novelty of the research is in the attempt to use the method of

dictionary-based sentiment analysis applied to the newspapers

articles.

This research was aimed at identifying the tonality of the

concept “Refugee” in the publicist discourse, using the example

of a newspaper article genre.

1.2. Research Hypothesis

There are concepts in German linguistic culture, that are

implemented in the discourse process of the language system,

have a certain specificity and lend themselves to linguistic

research. The concept “Refugee” considered in publicist

discourse is such a concept. This concept cannot be analysed in

isolation from the context of newspapers, namely, from the

political situation in Germany and the significant difference in the

attitude to migration and refugees among representatives of

various political factions. The null hypothesis of the study is the

absence of differences between the representation of the concept

“Refugee” in sources of different political content. The alternative

hypothesis suggests the presence of these differences.

Methods

.1 Aims of the research

The following objectives were pursued in the research: 1)

machine analysis of the concept “Refugee” considering articles

from online versions of the conservative (Deutschland Kurier),

liberal (Die Tageszeitung (Taz)) and social-democratic

newspapers (Stern); 2) determination of the tonality of the studied

concept “Refugee” and its classification into three categories:

negative, positive or neutral; 3) finding the interconnections

between the concept “Refugee” and emotional concepts.

017, M. Haller criticized the review of the refugee crisis and said

.2 Theoretical and Empirical Methods

The following methods were used in the research:

Theoretical: analysis of text lexical units collected from

that the events of 2015-2017 deepened the split between the mass

media of different political content, making each of the positions

more radical [10].

online newspapers, their study and generalization, synthesis;

empirical: dictionary-based sentiment analysis. Nowadays,

there are several sentiment dictionaries of the German language.

We used SentiWortschatz (SentiWS) [14], which contains 1,650

negative and 1,818 positive words in the range (-1; 1) for the

analysis. Another reason to choose SentiWS, in addition to its rich

content, was its focus on political and social vocabulary, which

makes it suitable for analysing the political newspapers articles.

The second sentiment dictionary, German Polarity Lexicon

As for the Germans themselves, recent studies show that they

do not have a pronounced, unambiguous attitude to the problem.

9% of the Germans are concerned about the influx of refugees,

but at the same time, they are aware of the economic benefits

associated with their presence in the country [11]. Moreover,

many of them believe that helping people who are forced to leave

their countries because of a life-threatening situation is the moral

duty of a prosperous European country. As for conceptology,

according to the study by O.G. Palutina, the presence of

controversial elements in the structure of concept is not

uncommon. The concept’s associations may contain both positive

and negative elements [12, p. 251-255].

(

“PolArt” -Lexicon) [15] contains 3,424 positive, 5,294 negative

and 662 neutral nouns, verbs and adjectives. The third dictionary,

German Emotion Dictionary [16], differs from the previously

mentioned, as it does not determine the tonality of the text

In its turn, the analysis of the text's tonality as a special class

of natural language processing is gaining popularity in

computational linguistics. Machine texts analysis conducted to

highlight the emotional component shows the fast pace of the

development as well as promising prospects. In particular,

machine methods allow one to process great amounts of texts,

while its manual analysis would be time-consuming. Foreign

studies have already dealt with the tonality analysis of political

texts, but they have mostly focused on analysing the social

networks discourse and short materials such as posts on Twitter.

For example, A. Bermingham and A. Smeaton used data from

Twitter to predict the results of the US presidential race, basing

(

negative or positive). Its purpose is to identify emotions in the

text, such as fear, joy, anger and others. To calculate tonality, an

algorithm was written in the Python programming language. The

general tonality of each text is understood as the difference

between the sum of all individual negative indicators and the sum

of all individual positive indicators. The model was validated

using an error matrix that showed a classification accuracy (f-1)

of 83% for a liberal source, 80% for a social-democratic source

and 70% for a conservative source.

.3 Research base

The study was based on sources that differ in political content.

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2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages: 1606-1610

The selection criteria were: (1) a belonging to a political party; (2)

the popularity of the source; (3) the availability of online versions

and a sufficient number of free materials. Selection according to

criteria excluded most potential sources, which allowed us to

concentrate on the three of them:

sources, it equals to 0.105 and 0.02). On the contrary, the most

negative materials were found in the conservative source

Deutschland Kurier.

Taz – an alternative liberal source, which criticizes the

political system of Germany;

Deutschland Kurier – a conservative, right-wing source,

which states to be “independent, non-traditional and affordable”;

Stern – a social-democratic source.

The selection of articles was carried out manually according

to the method of continuous sampling. In data collection,

representative tokens such as “Flüchtling” and “Asylsuchende”

became key tokens. Articles on the situation in Germany and not

in other countries were prioritized. As a result, 135 articles from

Taz, 139 articles from Deutschland Kurier and 149 articles from

Stern were collected.

Figure 1: The tonality changes of the concept “Refugee” in the examined

Results

sources from January 2019 to January 2020

According to Figure 1, the largest variation in the tonality of

the concept “Refugee” was shown by the social-democratic

source Stern with the distinct low points in March, August and

September. In addition to the dynamics calculated on the basis of

monthly average values, the graph also shows general trends in

the form of straight lines. The more positive tonality of the liberal

source Die Tageszeitung (Taz) (rising line) can be noticed.

Despite the controversial attitude of the Stern source to the object

under study, over the year the tonality has changed rather to a

positive one. The same, however, cannot be said of the

conservative source Deutschland Kurier, the tonality of which has

acquired more negative connotation over the year (descending

line). Table 1 contains a comparative analysis of the tonality of

the concept “Refugee” in the examined sources. The arithmetic

average makes it easy to notice that Stern has the most negative

tonality (0.184 for the selected range [-1; 1]). The liberal source

Die Tageszeitung (Taz) shows the most positive tonality with the

arithmetic average of 0.374. Materials taken from the

conservative source Deutschland Kurier have an average tonality

of 0.269. Big values of the standard deviation of the sources Stern

and Deutschland Kurier mean a larger variety of values in the

presented set with the average value. In other words, these sources

have more materials with enhanced positive or negative tonality.

Thus, the standard deviation of Deutschland Kurier is 0.374, of

Stern – 0.341, while for Taz it reaches only 0.236. At the same

time, the liberal source Taz contains more articles with a clear

positive attitude towards the concept “Refugee”. This is

evidenced by the presence of an upper limit, as well as by a

relatively high value of the lower quartile (0.280; while for other

The classification of source materials showed that the

conservative newspaper Deutschland Kurier has the greatest

number of negatively coloured materials (57%), followed by

neutral (28%) and positive materials (15%). Analysis of the

liberal source Die Tageszeitung (Taz) did not reveal the presence

of neutral-coloured materials at all. At the same time, a certain

prevalence of positive materials (53%) over negative (47%) was

found. The largest percentage of negative materials was found in

the social-democratic source Stern (58%). Positive and neutral

materials are outnumbered (40.3% and 1.34%, respectively)

(

Figure 2). Each of the examined sources showed a certain

connection with the emotional concepts of “contempt”, “fear”,

joy”, “surprise”, “sadness”, “anger”, and “disgust”. In each of

“

the sources, the vast majority of lexical units have no emotional

colouring. However, the smallest proportion of neutral lexical

units was found in the liberal source Die Tageszeitung (92.8%).

The largest neutrality was shown by the conservative source

Deutschland Kurier (94.1%). Figure 3 demonstrates that in liberal

and conservative sources the most obvious connection is with the

emotional concept of “contempt”, while in social-democratic it is

with the concept of “fear”. Perhaps, contempt is understood in the

liberal source as a criticism of the authorities’ inaction regarding

refugees and inadequate assistance, while the conservative source

is contemptuous towards the hosting of refugees and the use of

public resources.

Table 1: Descriptive statistics on the tonality of the concept “Refugee” in the examined sources

Taz

135

Deutschland Kurier

Stern

145

0.184

0.341

0.020

0.198

0.414

-0.53

Number of measurements

Arithmetic average

Standard deviation

Upper limit (Q1 + 1.5IQR (Interquartile range))*

Q1 (lower quartile**)

Q2 (median)

139

0.269

0.374

0.105

0.293

0.530

-0.455

0.374

0.236

0.775

0.280

0.394

0.499

-0.042

Q3 (upper quartile)

Lower limit (Q3 + 1.5IQR (Interquartile range))

The difference between upper and lower quartiles.

* A quartile is a type of quantile, which divides the number of data points into four more or less equal parts, or quarters (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)

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2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages: 1606-1610

The liberal source Die Tageszeitung is the only newspaper, in

which materials on the refugee concept are linked to the concept

of “joy”. At the same time, the liberal newspaper demonstrates

the weakest connection between the examined concept “Refugee”

and the emotional concept of “disgust”.

fact that about four years have passed since the crisis began, the

topic remains relevant and it causes polar opinions and reactions

in mass media. In all the three sources, materials with neutral

tonality are outnumbered or not present at all. At the same time,

the newspapers may reflect mixed emotions and the ambiguous

attitude of the Germans. All the three sources are not fully

negative or positive, as well as the Germans who can see the two

sides of the problem: the complexity of the crisis and promising

prospects. This conclusion contradicts a little to M. Haller’s

theses that there is a clear division in the German mass media,

which deteriorate continuously.

M. Berry, I. Garcia-Blanco and K. Moore point out that there

is both the absence of a predominant humanitarian element in

covering the refugee problem and the levelling of the threat to

economic and social stability. Our study showed that although

this characteristic applies to the German mass media as a whole,

different sources still have their unique characteristics. The

humanitarian element is more obvious in the liberal source, while

the conservative source associates refugees with violence, crime

and danger.

Percentage of texts of a certain tonality

Taz Deutschland Kurier Stern

8.39

56.12

2.59

7.41

0.27

8.78

15.11

The present study showed the attitude of various German

newspapers towards the concept “Refugee” in terms of tonality.

Such studies have not yet been conducted previously. However,

despite all its advantages, this research still has drawbacks. First,

the machine-based text classification model showed certain

accuracy only for the liberal and social democratic corpora, which

questions the reliability of the results for the conservative corpus

of texts. The lower effectiveness of the model based on the

.34

Negative

Positive

Neutral

Tonality

Figure 2: Percentage of texts of a certain tonality of the concept

“

Refugee”

dictionary-based sentiment analysis when analysing

conservative source can be explained by the widespread use of

sarcasm. Determining the true intentions of sarcastic texts is still

a difficult task for machine methods of processing natural

language. Second, we examined newspapers publications made

during only one year (2019), which does not allow us to conclude

the dynamics of the tonality changes in press.

Further research may focus on developing a more accurate

text classification model and analysing large volumes of

materials. Besides, the analysis of political texts offers a wide

range of possible areas of research, such as thematic modelling

and forecasting the development of public opinion regarding a

concept.

1212

5 Conclusion

The analysis of the tonality of the concept “Refugee” in the

German mass media discourse of various political content

demonstrates results: 1. During the examined period (from

January, 2019 to January, 2020), the most significant negative

tonality was shown by the social-democratic source Stern. The

liberal newspaper Die Tageszeitung, in comparison with Stern,

reacted to the refugee crisis with more positive publications. The

tonality of the conservative newspaper Deutschland Kurier is in

the middle. 2. The arithmetic average of Stern is 0.184; the one of

Deutschland Kurier is 0.269; and for Die Tageszeitung it is 0.374.

It allows the Social Democratic source to have the most negative

tonality. 3. Considering the above-mentioned newspapers from

the point of view of positive, neutral or negative tonality, we can

conclude that the social-democratic newspaper source Stern has

58% of negative, 40.3% of positive and 1.34% of neutral

Taz

Deutschland Kurier

Stern

Figure 3: The interconnections between the concept “Refugee” and

emotional concepts in the examined sources

Discussion

Summing up, we can conclude that the alternative hypothesis

of the research was confirmed. There are quite noticeable

differences in the tonality of the concept “Refugee” in sources of

different political content, which was also found out in the recent

study by G. Nordheim, H. Müller and M. Scheppe [9]. Despite the

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2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages: 1606-1610

publications. The liberal newspaper Die Tageszeitung has 53%

positive and 47% negative publications. There are no neutrally

coloured articles. Finally, in the conservative source Deutschland

Kurier negative materials are in the top position (57%), while

neutral materials and positive publication are only 28% and 15%

respectively.

At the beginning of the study, as an alternative hypothesis, we

assumed that newspapers would differ in the tonality of the

concept “Refugee”, which was confirmed by the results. We plan

to examine the dynamics of the tonality changes of the concept

10. Haller M. Die „Flüchtlingskrise“ in den Medien. Tagesaktueller

Journalismus zwischen Meinung und Information. Otto Brenner

Schtiftung; 2017. Available from: https://www.otto-brenner-

stiftung.de/fileadmin/user_data/stiftung/02_Wissenschaftsportal/03

Publikationen/AH93_Fluechtingskrise_Haller_2017_07_20.pdf

(accessed June 5, 2020).

1. Mosel I, Smart C, Foresti M, Hennessey G, Leach A. Public

narratives and attitudes towards refugees and other migrants; 2019.

Available from: https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-

documents/12970.pdf (accessed June 5, 2020).

2. Palutina OG. Conceptual Structure of SLAVA/FAME/RUHM in

Russian, American and German Consciousness. Journal of

Sustainable Development. 2015; 8(5):251-255.

3. Bermingham A, Smeaton A. On using Twitter to monitor political

sentiment and predict election results. In: Proceedings of the

Workshop on Sentiment Analysis where AI meets Psychology,

(SAAIP), IJCNLP 2011, Chiang Mai, Thailand, November 13,

“

Refugee” during 2020 in our further research.

Ethical issue

Authors are aware of, and comply with, best practice in

publication ethics specifically with regard to authorship

011; 2011. p. 2-10.

(

avoidance of guest authorship), dual submission, manipulation

4. Remus R, Quasthoff U, Heyer G. SentiWS-A Publicly Available

German-language Resource for Sentiment Analysis. In: Proceedings

of the 7th International Language Resources and Evaluation

of figures, competing interests and compliance with policies on

research ethics. Authors adhere to publication requirements that

submitted work is original and has not been published elsewhere

in any language.

(

LREC’10); 2010. p. 1168–1171.

5. Klenner M, Fahrni A, Petrakis S. Polart: A robust tool for sentiment

analysis. In: Jokinen K, Bick E, editors. Proceedings of the 17th

Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA

Competing interests

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that

would prejudice the impartiality of this scientific work.

009), Odense, Denmark, May 14-16, 2009. Northern European

Association for Language Technology (NEALT); 2009. p. 235-238.

6. Klinger R, Suliya SS, Reiter N. Automatic emotion detection for

quantitative literary studies - a case study on Kafka's "Das Schloss"

and "Amerika". In: Digital Humanities 2016: Conference Abstracts,

Kraków, Poland; 2016. p. 826-828.

Authors’ contribution

All authors of this study have a complete contribution for data

collection, data analyses and manuscript writing.

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