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‘The Refugee Crisis in British and Spanish online newspapers: cognitive approaches to multimodal discourses of migration’

By emma.brooks, on 15 March 2022

Javier Mármol Queraltó, Lancaster University

Tuesday 15th March:

‘In the context of the recent political and migratory events occurring in Europe, the dynamics of inequality is a recurrent topic in public discourses in international spheres (Deardoff, 2017). While much has been written on media representations of migration in the linguistic modality (Baker et al., 2008; El Refaie, 2001), comparatively little has been written about the visual depiction of migrants and refugees. This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities more generally (Economou, 2006). This paper advocates a cognitive linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) and analyses online newspapers multimodal phenomena (Hart, 2015) of the 2015-16 Refugee Crisis in language and image, in order to assess the interactions between these modalities in terms of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021) and their potential ideological implications.

This paper focuses on event-construal (Langacker, 2008), and my claim is that the ideological purport of newspapers in the process of forcing a specific perspective toward the event can serve to create alternative, ideology-vested, realities, both in language and image (Hart, 2016). Analysis of enactors of schematisation, metaphor and viewpoint can potentially be applied across languages and modalities (Hart, 2017a), and such approach will be shown in the analysis of Spanish and British news reports. This paper focuses on the critical examination of and emerging interactions between images and specific linguistic elements within online news reports (headline, subheading, caption and lead paragraph), and the (in)congruent relationships there might occur in the shape of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021).

References:

Baker, P., et al. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273-306.

Deardorff, S. (2017). Political and Humanitarian Responses to Syrian Displacement. Abingdon: Routledge.

Economou, D. (2006). The big picture: The role of the lead image in print feature stories. In I. Lassen, J. Strunck y T. Vestergaard (Eds.), Mediating Ideology in Text and Image. Ten Critical Studies (pp. 211-233). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

El Refaie, E. (2001). Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalized themes in Austrian newspaper articles about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(3), 352-371.

Hart, C. (2015). Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 238-260.

Hart, C. (2016). The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse analysis: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods. Discourse and Society, 27(3), 335-350.

Hart, C. (2017a). Cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies: Connecting language and image. In R. Wodak & B. Forchtner (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge.

Hart, C., & Mármol Queraltó, J. (2021). What can Cognitive Linguistics tell us about Language-Image relations? A multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(4), 529-562.

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: OUP.

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