Metonymies, Immigration and the Press: From Ilegales to Guiris

Abstract

The current paper explores the Lexical and Conceptual Metonymies employed by the Spanish press to refer to immigrants from cognitive and critical discourse perspectives. Two corpora of news stories are analyzed: the first contains news stories from the Comunidad de Madrid, whereas the second is contextualized and geolocalized in a particular area of Madrid, Lavapiés, where several studies have revealed a tendency to use the diversity present in this territory as a marketing strategy. The analysis brings to light differences and similarities in the underlying metonymical discourse of each corpus, namely in terms of the distribution of the Conceptual Metonymies found therein, as well as their correlation with a positive, neutral or negative assessment of the given news story. The metonymical discourse of the first corpus correlates most strongly with neutral assessments, while that of the second corpus correlates largely with positive assessments of the conceptualizations.