The representation of refuge and migration in the online media in Brazil and abroad: a Cognitive Linguistics analysis

Abstract

The present study aims at mapping how the situation of refuge and migration is represented metaphorically in the Brazilian online media. From the data collected, we will establish comparisons between the representations that were found. An approach that contemplates the frame study employed in the media allows us to observe that verbal and nonverbal resources, metaphorical sentences and lexical items are constituted into discursive frames. We intend todiscuss how the migrant and the refugee are represented in the Brazilian online media. Some questions we will investigate are: What are the discourses on the reception of refugees and migrants? Which discourses on the integration of refugees and migrants are broadcasted? From these questions, we will examine how such categories compose the image of the migrant and the refugee. The corpus used was based on the news of the online newspaper Folha de São Paulo from June, 2015, seen as it was in this month that the so called “refugee crisis” occurred in Europe. The gathering and analysis were done with the help of two free softwares: Notepad++, that allows the user to save texts in txt format, and Antconc, that enables the analysis of several txt files through tools that are used in Corpus Linguistics. The concordance lines obtained by inserting a word of choice in AntConc’s concordancer were then analyzed manually through Cameron’s (2010) Metaphor-led Discourse Analysis. A larger objective will be to identify which metaphorical frames are used in the migrant’s and refugee’s media representation and what are their social implications. Such frames contribute to organize and potentialize the discourse about the Other (BRUNO, 2016).