Metaphors of Crisis Migration: Evidence from a Cross-National Corpus Study

Abstract

The study explores the role of metaphors in European media representations of migrants and refugees du-ring the ‘refugee crisis’. It is conducted on a corpus of over six million words, consisting of newspa-per articles published between 2015 and 2018 in Poland, Spain, and the UK. It employs a con-cordancer to retrieve all instantiations of metaphors: (1) identified via a manual search in a sample of the corpus using the Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2007); and (2) discussed in previous studies concerning metaphorical representations of immigrants (e.g., El Refaie, 2001; Mu-solff, 2015; Taylor, 2021). Five main metaphors have been detected which liken migrants to commod-ities, liquids, animals, invaders, and (unwanted) guests, with some variation across the three subcor-pora. The identified metaphors’ functions are examined and potential implications are discussed. The results help put some of the frequently discussed mappings into perspective by pointing to a possible disproportion between the amount of attention paid to some metaphors in previous contributions and their actual frequencies in migration-related media discourse.