Migrating across times and cultures
Metaphorical images of migration in the U.S. and Italian newspaper discourse between the 20th and 21st centuries
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- ai penultimiContents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- The historical socio-political context
- Modern migrations between the late 1800s and the early 1900s
- United States in the early 1900s
- Italy in the early 1900s
- Contemporary migrations in the early 2000s
- United States in the early 2000s
- Italy in the early 2000s
- Four assumptions regarding the context
- Representation in newspaper discourse
- Representation and culture
- Journalism, objectivity, and reality
- A dynamic theory for linguistic representation in the press
- Axis of representation: concepts, signs and objects
- Axis of communication: the maker/writer and the beholder/reader
- Representation, discourse and metaphors
- Research question
- Overview of the book
- Theories on Metaphors in Discourse
- Introduction
- The foundations of metaphors
- Classic theory
- Previous contributions to the cognitive shift
- Metaphors, language and thought
- Metaphor, meaning in context
- Creativity: from novel to conventional metaphors
- A cognitive approach to metaphor
- Metaphor, from language to concepts
- A working definition of metaphor
- Migration Discourse and the Media
- Introduction
- The discursive representation of migration in the media
- Migration in the press
- Migration in political discourse
- Migration in on-line newspapers and forums
- Metaphor and migration
- Frames in migration discourse
- Migration is a ‘problem’
- Liquid metaphors
- Invasion metaphors
- Non-human metaphors: migrants as animal, weeds and pollution
- Migration is a ‘resource’
- Migration is an ‘object’
- The characteristics of migration research
- Concluding remarks
- Methodology and Data
- Introduction
- Discourse
- CADS – The cooperation between corpus linguistics and discourse studies to study discourse
- Cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse studies – definition and challenges
- Additional challenges with diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies
- Data collection, corpus design and compilation
- Selecting search terms
- English search terms
- Italian search terms
- Corpora overview
- Methodological approaches to the study of conceptual metaphors
- Preliminary discussion on metaphor identification and analytical procedures
- Metaphor identification procedure
- Step A – Preliminary conceptual and operational decisions
- Step B – Quantitative analysis – collocation analysis
- Step C – Qualitative analysis – metaphor categorisation and comparison
- Concluding remarks – a diachronic cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study
- Metaphors of Migration in the USA Between 1900 and 2000
- Introduction
- Metaphors of migration 1900–1914 in the USA
- Migrants are objects
- Migrants are liquid
- Migrants are animals
- Migrants are pollution
- Migrants are enemy/invaders
- Metaphors of migration 2000–2014 in the USA
- Migrants are liquid
- Migrants are criminals
- Migrants are objects
- Migrants are animals
- Migrants are enemy/invaders
- Migrants are pollution
- Migrant are a resource
- Metaphors of Migration in Italy Between 1900 and 2000
- Introduction
- Metaphor of migration in Italy 1900–1914
- Migrants are liquid
- Migrants are enemy/invaders
- Migrants are objects
- Metaphor of migration in TLS1900
- Metaphor of migration in Italy 2000–2014
- Migrants are enemy/invaders
- Migrants are liquid
- Migrants are criminals
- Migrants are objects
- Metaphor of migration in TLS2000
- Migration Across Times and Cultures
- Introduction
- Metaphors of migration across time
- Metaphors of migration in the USA between the 1900s and the 2000s
- Metaphors of migration in Italy between the 1900s and the 2000s
- Metaphors of migration across cultures
- Metaphors of migration between Italy and the USA in 1900s
- Metaphors of migration between Italy and the USA in 2000s
- A distant perspective on migration: metaphors across times and cultures
- Conclusive Reflections
- Final summary
- Limitations
- Further directions
- References
- Index
List of Tables
Table 2.1:A schematic view of Conceptual mapping, from language to concepts
Table 4.1:Overview of the four corpora compiled
Table 4.2:Metaphor categorization format
Table 5.1:Overview of patterns of conceptual metaphors
Table 5.2:objects metaphors in NYHC1900
Table 5.3:liquid linguistic metaphors in NYHC1900
Table 5.4:L3/R3 collocates of ‘rush of’
Table 5.5:animal linguistic metaphor in NYHC1900
Table 5.6:L2/R2 Collocates of ‘feed’ in COHA
Table 5.7:pollution linguistic metaphor in NYHC1900
Table 5.8:invaders linguistic metaphor and criminals linguistic metaphors in NYHC1900
Table 5.9:Overview of patterns of conceptual metaphors
Table 5.10:Collocations of liquid metaphors with migrants in NYTC2000
Table 5.11:L1 collocate of liquid metaphors
Table 5.12:criminals in NYTC2000
Table 5.13:R1/R5 collocates of ‘unarmed’ with migrant terms
Table 5.14:objects metaphors in NYTC2000
Table 5.15:Collocations of number/statistics metaphors with migrants in NYTC2000
Table 5.16:animal linguistic metaphors in NYTC2000
Table 5.17:invaders linguistic metaphors in NYTC2000
Table 5.18:weed linguistic metaphors in NYTC2000
Table 5.19:Collocates of resource metaphor migrants in NYTC2000
Table 6.1:Overview of patterns of conceptual metaphors in TLS1900
Table 6.2:The first 10 R1 collocates of emigrat* and emigrant*
Table 6.3:liquid linguistic metaphors in TLS1900
Table 6.4:R1 collocates of ‘onda’ (wave) and ‘formidabile’ (terrific)
Table 6.5:invaders metaphors in TLS1900
Table 6.6b:R1/R5 Collocates of ‘carico’ in TLS1900
Table 6.7:R1/R5 Collocates of ‘carico’ in TLS1900
Table 6.8:Overview of conceptual metaphor of migration in Italy 2000–14
Table 6.9:invasion metaphors in TLS2000
Table 6.10:water metaphors in TLS2000
Table 6.11:Collocates of liquid + ‘di’ (of) + migrant
Table 6.12:illegal metaphor in TLS2000
Table 6.13:R1/R5 collocates of ‘trafficant*’
Table 6.14:burden metaphors in TLS2000
Acknowledgements
This book, as its title suggests, has travelled across times and spaces in a chain of events that have influenced each other to this day. The journey began in Rocca di Mezzo, in the heart of Abruzzo, Italy. After spending 15 years there, the book moved to L'Aquila for 5 years. Following this, it spent a significant 6-year period in Siena, where it found the energy and courage to leave its homeland for a foreign country. A fundamental step was in Brighton, with important and pivotal journeys along the south coast to Chichester and then to London. Eventually, Italy called it back, and Padova welcomed it, providing a proper home. After four years in Padova and a brief stop in Pisa, the book arrived in Ferrara, where it took on its final (not complete) form.
Research is a collaborative process, and I am deeply indebted to all the individuals who made this journey meaningful by donating their time, space, and energy. I am grateful to Professor Maria Teresa Musacchio, who welcomed me in Padova, agreed to supervise this work as a PhD project, supported its development during the post-doc and its publication, and showed me the importance of terminology in cross-linguistic investigations. Special thanks to Professor Charlotte Taylor for her PhD supervision, invaluable feedback, and for teaching me the fundamental notion of reflexivity through our open discussions. Thank you to Professor Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio for his PhD supervision, for his advice, and for illustrating the importance of open science and interdisciplinarity. Thank you to Professor Alison Duguid, with whom this research journey began, for her precious support and encouragement. Thank you to Professor Eleonora Federici for her helpful advices and for her support. Additional gratitude goes to Carla Quinci for her insightful comments on the preliminary stages of the manuscript, and to Federica Formato and Virginia Zorzi for their many helpful comments and simply for being friends.
I also want to acknowledge those who have supported me over the years—you know who you are. Especially, I would like to thank Fabio Alcantara, Andrea Gelardi, Riccardo Socci, Roberta Agnifili, Laura Di Clemente, Andrea Di Stefano, Lara Marrama Saccente, Giorgio Sacchetti, Emanuele Tesone, Pier Giovanni Adamo, Marco Biasio, Giuseppe Calì, Stefano Fortin, Giorgia Gallucci and Giacomo Morbiato for sharing the toughest times of our lives together. Thanks to James Harstein, William McEvoy, Maisie Ridgway, and Will Stronge for their sincere and honest socio-cultural support and friendship. Thank you to those who are no longer here, but run elsewhere.
I could not have concluded this work without the emotional support from Elisabetta, who, despite not being endowed with the gift of patience, gave everything for this book.
I wish to dedicate this book to my father, my mother, my brother, my grandparents, and all my family, who, despite everything, were always there.
Preface
Historically, metaphors have been studied from different perspectives, but it is only in the last century that a new understanding of metaphor has emerged thanks to cognitive science. Studies have explored metaphor in general and special language, within and across disciplines, synchronically and diachronically, and corpora have offered more examples of what is undoubtedly a scarce good in all realms of human communication. Far from being a mere embellishment of text, metaphor has emerged as a powerful discursive tool to reveal and obscure, thus affecting the readers’/listeners’ perception and – ultimately – their interpretation.
Particularly fruitful research appears to combine different approaches as is the case with this volume, where cognitive science joins corpus-assisted discourse studies to investigate metaphor as representation of the thorny issue of migration in the US and Italian press at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. Within the general language of the media, this diachronic study traces the origins, adoption and use of metaphors in an attempt to address the need for in-depth exploration of the historical and geographical dimensions of metaphorical language. The underlying hypothesis is that language reflects the different histories of migration in the United States and Italy, reveals political agendas and exposes prejudice.
To shirk anecdote and put his work on firm ground, the author discusses theories of metaphor in discourse, reviews significant contributions to the study of the linguistic representation of migrants in the media and describes procedures of metaphor identification and categorization. In a diachronic study using an interlinguistic and cross-cultural approach, however, the greatest challenge lies in compiling a comparable corpus that is well-designed and large enough to be both representative and balanced to yield reliable data for human interpretation as there seems to be still some way to go before metaphors can be extracted fully automatically.
Details
- Pages
- 338
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034349574
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034349581
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783034346597
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21857
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (September)
- Keywords
- conceptual metaphor theory Migration studies media representation of migration across history and cultures
- Published
- Lausanne, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, New York, Oxford, 2024. 338 pp., 36 fig. b/w, 40 tables.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
