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This paper analyses the main linguistic and visual characteristics of sub-Saharan immigrants represented as illegal in a sample from the Spanish press, and the ideological consequences for the audience of the newspapers. The data consists of all the news items published on sub-Saharan immigrants in the digital editions of the three most popular Spanish newspapers, El País, ABC and El Mundo, from 1 June 2011 to 1 June 2014. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and van Leeuwen's (2008) model for the verbal and visual representation of social actors will be used to study the main characteristics of the written language used to refer to sub-Saharan immigrants as illegal in three main ways: as victims, as heroes and as threats. In addition, Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar will be the theoretical framework used to analyse the photographs published in the newspapers studied in order to observe the main visual characteristics that contribute to the portrayal of immigrants as illegal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to prove that the recurrent use of predicated themes in the novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton has certain communicative implications, since they are appropriate to express feelings, and to highlight information in situations of climax in the novels under analysis. The analysis of this syntactic structure in context will point out that predicated themes allow the writer to be conscious that he is asserting or denying something in a firm way; the predicated theme is also an important structure for the textual organisation of discourse. The linguistic framework for this paper is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), a linguistic school that establishes a clear link between lexico-grammatical choices in the text, and the relevant contextual factors surrounding it. Systemic linguistics explores how linguistic choices are related to the meanings that are being expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]