Metaphorical Representations of Migrants in the Italian and British Press During a Time of Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metaphors have a way of influencing the way we feel and think about political and societal issues. The goal of this paper is to examine the metaphorical portrayal of immigrants who entered Italy and the UK between January and December 2011, a time when both the economic and migration crisis occurred. The study follows a mixed-method approach, combining corpus linguistic and critical metaphor analyses in order to identify the metaphorical expressions employed by the press—and the politicians they quote—in the construction of migration discourse. The underlying conceptual metaphor of each metaphorical expression was identified and the findings have shown that the conceptual representation of migrants is centred around the following source domains: natural disaster, container, invasion and animal, with a strong predominance of the first. The discourse focuses on identity-related concerns as they relate to constructs of the ‘other’ and how immigrants are portrayed as a threat and risk. Future research will investigate the metaphorical representation of intra- versus extra-European migrants and will consider both routine and other ‘migration crisis’ periods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".