REPRESENTATION OF THE SLAVIC ETHNICITY IN THE ITALIAN NEWSPAPER LA REPUBBLICA

The article describes the way in which the Italian daily newspapers represent and construct the image of Slavic ethnicity (EU member states only). The aim is to provide the general insight into the image the Italians have about the Slavic countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) in order to observe whether there are some fixed patterns of presenting these countries/nations in Italian daily newspaper. For the purpose of this study, the corpus of newspaper articles containing terms related to the names of the countries involved in the analysis is used. Newspaper articles were obtained from the digital version of Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and they include all the articles in the period of six months, i.e. from 1st June 2016 to 31st December 2016. Once the occurrences are identified, the categorical apparatus is established to analyse the articles according to the topic and the position within the article. The quantitative analysis was applied and the empirical results were presented.