“Soglia”, the Italian noun for “threshold”, carries two contrasting meanings: it is the point that welcomes into a place and the limit of the place itself. It is, very often, related to the same semantic field of “limit” and “border” and it often collocates accordingly. The outrageous slaughter of men and women that has taken place in the Mediterranean sea lately compels us to question the entire concept of border and its related meanings. In this context, the island of Lampedusa can metaphorically be seen as the battlefield of the two opposing meanings of “soglia”. Moving from the assumption that the construction of an alleged European identity is reinforced by the construction of “borders” and “barriers”, the paper investigates how the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck (also called “boat-migrants”) is represented in some English TV news .Via the adoption of a multimodal corpus-assisted approach (Baldry, Thibault 2008; Kress 2010), the paper starts analysing the metaphors linked to the social construction of Lampedusa as the “soglia” of Europe. It will do so by seeing “soglia” in the wider framework of what can be termed as a “dominant imaginary”, in the representation of migration
"RE-COLLOCATING" LAMPEDUSA AS THE "IMAGINARY" THRESHOLD OF EUROPE
VIGO, Francesca Maria
;
2019-01-01
Abstract
“Soglia”, the Italian noun for “threshold”, carries two contrasting meanings: it is the point that welcomes into a place and the limit of the place itself. It is, very often, related to the same semantic field of “limit” and “border” and it often collocates accordingly. The outrageous slaughter of men and women that has taken place in the Mediterranean sea lately compels us to question the entire concept of border and its related meanings. In this context, the island of Lampedusa can metaphorically be seen as the battlefield of the two opposing meanings of “soglia”. Moving from the assumption that the construction of an alleged European identity is reinforced by the construction of “borders” and “barriers”, the paper investigates how the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck (also called “boat-migrants”) is represented in some English TV news .Via the adoption of a multimodal corpus-assisted approach (Baldry, Thibault 2008; Kress 2010), the paper starts analysing the metaphors linked to the social construction of Lampedusa as the “soglia” of Europe. It will do so by seeing “soglia” in the wider framework of what can be termed as a “dominant imaginary”, in the representation of migrationI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
