TÜRK VE ALMAN GAZETELERİNDE SURİYELİ MÜLTECİLERLE İLGİLİ ÖRTMECE SÖZLER

Abstract

This study examines euphemistic expressions in 100 news texts containing the keywords “Suriyeli mülteci” and “syrische Flüchtlinge”, from two national newspapers, daily circulated in Türkiye and Germany between the years 2011 and 2020. The main aim of the study is, in the first place, to reveal the euphemistic expressions by which Syrians and the events, situations related to them are represented in newspaper reports, and via which discursive strategies these euphemisms are constructed and which ideological orientations they reflect; subsequently, creating awareness about the people who are marginalized by those words no matter chosen consciously or unconsciously, thus, enhancing linguistic sensitivity. Within the scope of the study, the impact of the relations between the media and political and economic power elites on media discourse was investigated; the issues of how those selected discursive strategies emerge and the role they play in reproduction of mental models were analysed from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective. The euphemistic expressions identified in the news texts were coded hierarchically in MAXQDA by utilizing certain discourse strategies such as nomination, predication, framing and topos by various theorists. The visualization software tools were used to illustrate the encoded outcome comparatively, and the findings were interpreted through the method of Critical Discourse Analysis. The data obtained as the result of the study indicate that the lexical preferences of the newspapers in Türkiye regarding Syrians and the events and situations related to them show parallelism with the editorial policies of the newspaper, its ownership structures and ideological orientations, hence, the fact that such factors largely homogenize the discourse whereas in German newspapers, it is possible to speak of a discursive polyphony due to the greater variety of journalistic genres, such as interviews and guest columns.