Metaphoric representations of the migration crisis in Hungarian online newspapers

A first approximation

Résumé

The present paper undertakes a corpus-based investigation to reconstruct the linguistic imagery used in the conceptualization of migrants in Hungarian public discourse in 2014- 2015. The starting point of our analysis is a corpus of ca. 35 million words consisting of the on-line accessible articles of a Hungarian daily and a weekly. The relevant data are extracted by a semi-automatic procedure (the so-called “funnel method”) developed by one of the authors for the exploration of the central metaphors of a particular field. Our findings suggest that the most prominent metaphors in the conceptualization of the migration crisis in the Hungarian online press are centered around the following source domains: FLOOD, WAR, OBJECT, PRESS/BURDEN, ANIMAL, and BUILDING. The metaphoric expressions we have found are characterized by a relatively high frequency of occurrence and a relatively low degree of variation regarding their linguistic manifestation and conceptual elaboration.