FRAMES OF MIND: METAPHOR-MORPHOSIS OF MIGRATION INTO FLOODING IN THE BRITISH AND THE BULGARIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

One of the main areas of research in the field of cognitive linguistics is metaphor as a central tenet of both language and cognition. The more traditional views of its position as a rare and highly original rhetoric and literary device have been challenged by the cognitive enterprise, whose stand in the matter emphasizes its pervasive nature as a basic structuring element of human cognition. Through the prism of cognitive linguistics, the present study researches the cognitive metaphor MIGRATION IS A FLOODING CRISIS in the discourse of two British (the Guardian and the Independent) and two Bulgarian (Standart and Dnevnik) media outlets. The main purpose of the paper is to test a hypothesis concerning the mappings between the domains of floods and immigration, where the structure of a flooding crisis is projected onto the structure of immigrant movement. With the help of lexical items from the sematic fields of flooding and immigration, such as flood, swamp, inundate, pour, burst, flow, influx, wave, flow, (im)migrants, refugees, workers and asylum seekers, 23 example sentences have been excerpted from the online databases of the Guardian, the Independent, Standart and Dnevnik and analyzed qualitatively in order to check the preformulated hypothesis. The main methods of analysis are Critical Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis. The research shows evidence of structuring of migration in terms of a flooding crisis in the researched British and Bulgarian media discourse and finds out that both the British and the Bulgarian media discourse contains examples the same basic structuring projections from the domain of floods towards the domain of immigration, even though the linguistic realization of these mappings differs in the two media discourses. The mappings between the domain of floods and the domain of immigration are as follows: immigrants / refugees / foreign worker are conceptualized as flooding waters and the arrival of large number of immigrants is conceived as a flooding event, the borders between countries are perceived as riverbanks/coastlines, the immigrant’s destination countries are envisaged as flooded areas, while immigrants native counties are seen as riverbeds/ocean floors, and the problems caused by immigrants are envisaged as devastations from flooding events. The comparative nature of the study and its research into the Bulgarian media discourse can be considered as one of its contributions. A possible extension of the research could be a comparative diachronic investigation of the frequency of occurrences of different linguistic realizations of the cognitive metaphor MIGRATION IS A FLOODING CRISIS and possible changes in terms of its avoidance, with respect to its dehumanizing effects.