Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 21:3 (2022) ► pp.413–434

Migrants are not welcome

Metaphorical framing of fled people in Hungarian online media, 2015–2018

ORCID logo | Corvinus University of Budapest
ORCID logo | Centre for Social Sciences
Figurative framing, in the form of metaphorical expressions, is especially effective in carrying conceptual content on an issue and affecting public opinion. One topic that has been heavily debated in contemporary Hungarian media is migration. Framing starts with the label that journalists select to refer to fled people: bevándorló (“immigrant”), migráns (“migrant”) or menekült (“refugee”). Depending on the label, different associations emerge, resting upon differing (metaphorical) conceptualizations evoked by the labels. We analysed metaphorical compounds based on the keywords in a media corpus of approx. 15 million words. Our results indicate that while all three keywords evoke predominantly negative frames and evaluations that build on stock metaphorical conceptualizations of fled people as also identified in the international literature – such as flood, object, business, war and crime –, the distribution of these metaphors does vary, depending on a) the selected keyword; and b) the political agenda of the media source.
Keywords: framing, metaphor, migrant, Hungary, media, immigrant, asylum seeker, migration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The metaphorical framing of fled people
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Source domains occurring with the keywords
    • 4.2Distribution of source domains across time periods
    • 4.3The effect of political leaning on the use of keywords and source domains
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20042.ben
References (61)
References
Arcimaviciene, Liudmila, and Sercan Hamza Baglama. 2018. “Migration, Metaphor and Myth in Media Representations: The Ideological Dichotomy of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’.” SAGE Open 8 (2): 1–13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baider, F., and M. Kopytowska. 2017. “Conceptualising the Other: Online Discourses on the Current Refugee Crisis in Cyprus and in Poland.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 13 (2): 203–233. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, and Tony McEnery. 2005. “A Corpus-based Approach to Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in UN and Newspaper Texts.” Journal of Language & Politics 4 (2): 197–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Balabanova, Ekaterina, and Alex Balch. 2020. “Norm Destruction, Norm Resilience: The Media and Refugee Protection in the UK and Hungary during Europe’s ‘Migrant Crisis’.” Journal of Language and Politics 19 (3): 413–435. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Balch, Alex, and Ekaterina Balabanova. 2016. “Ethics, Politics and Migration: Public Debates on the Free Movement of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK, 2006–2013.” Politics 36 (1): 19–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bene, Márton, and Gabriella Szabó. 2019. “Bonded by Interactions: Polarising Factors and Integrative Capacities of the News Media in Hungary.” Javnost – The Public 26 (3): 309–329. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Samuel, Jessica ter Wal, Artur Lipiński, Małgorzata Fabiszak, and Michał Krzyżanowski. 2013. “The Representation of Third-country Nationals in European News Discourse.” Journalism Practice 7 (3): 248–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernáth, Gábor, and Vera Messing. 2015. “Bedarálva. A menekültekkel kapcsolatos kormányzati kampány és a tőle független megszólalás terepei [Governmental anti-migrant narratives and the potentials of independent discourses].” Médiakutató 16 (4): 7–17.Google Scholar
Bocskor, Ákos. 2018. “Anti-immigration Discourses in Hungary During the ‘Crisis’ Year: The Orbán Government’s ‘National Consultation’ Campaign. Sociology 52 (3): 551–568. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bos, Linda, Sophie Lecheler, Moniek Mewafi, and Rens Vliegenthart. 2016. “It’s the Frame That Matters: Immigrant Integration and Media Framing Effects in the Netherlands.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 551: 97–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burgers, Christian, Elly A. Konijn, and Gerard J. Steen. 2016. “Figurative Framing: Shaping Public Discourse through Metaphor, Hyperbole, and Irony.” Communication Theory 261: 410–430. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cs. Nagy, Lajos. 1995. “A szóalkotás módjai [Types of word-formation processes].” In A magyar nyelv könyve, ed. by Anna A. Jászó, 272–300. Budapest: Trezor.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2006. “Britain As a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign.” Discourse and Society 17 (6): 563–582. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cisneros, David J. 2008. “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant As Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (4): 569–602. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dervinytė, Inga. 2009. “Conceptual Emigration and Immigration Metaphors in the Language of the Press: A Contrastive Analysis.” Kalbų studijos / Studies about Languages 141: 49–55.Google Scholar
Eberl, Jakob-Moritz, Christine E. Meltzer, Tobias Heidenreich, Beatrice Herrero, Nora Theorin, Fabienne Lind, Rosa Berganza, Hajo G. Boomgaarden, Christian Schemer, and Jesper Strömbäck. 2018. “The European Media Discourse on Immigration and Its Effects: A Literature Review.” Annals of the International Communication Association 42 (3): 207–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egres, Dorottya. 2018. “Symbolic and Realistic Threats – Frame Analysis of Political and Media Discourses about Refugees and Migrants.” Society and Economy 40 (3): 463–477. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
El Rafaie, Elisabeth. 2001. “Metaphors We Discriminate By: Naturalized Themes in Austrian Newspaper Articles about Asylum Seekers.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (3): 352–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Mark, and Richard Wright. 1998. “The Balkanization Metaphor in the Analysis of U.S. Immigration.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (4): 686–698. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Entman, Robert M. 1993. “Framing: Toward the Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43 (4): 51–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farris, Emily M., and Heather Silber Mohamed, H. 2018. “Picturing Immigration: How the Media Criminalizes Immigrants.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 (4): 814–824. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fausey, Caitlin M., and Teeny Matlock. 2011. “Can Grammar Win Elections? Grammar and Elections.” Political Psychology 32 (4): 563–574. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gamson, William A., and Kathryn E. Lasch. 1983. “The Political Culture of Social Welfare Policy.” In Evaluating the Welfare State: Social and Political Perspectives, ed. by S. E. Spiro, and E. Yuchtman-Yaar, 397–415. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Ervin. 1974/1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Reprint. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Greussing, Esther, and Hajo G. Boomgaarden. 2017. “Shifting the Refugee Narrative? An Automated Frame Analysis of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (11): 1749–1774. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Griebel, Tim, and Erik Vollmann. 2019. “We Can (’t) Do This: A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Migration in Germany.” Journal of Language and Politics 18 (5): 671–697. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Casey T., and Jeff Gruenewald, J. 2020. “News Media Trends in the Framing of Immigration and Crime, 1990–2013.” Social Problems 67 (3): 452–470.Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2021. “Animals vs. Armies: Resistance to Extreme Metaphors in Anti-immigration Discourse.” Journal of Language and Politics 20 (2): 226–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janky, Béla. 2019. “Changing Connotations and the Evolution of the Effect of Wording Labelling Asylum Seekers in a Political Campaign.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 31 (4): 714–737. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kálmán, László. 2015. “Honnan menekülnek, hova vándorolnak? [Where are they fleeing from and where are they migrating to?]” [URL] (accessed 10 June 2019).
Kenyeres, Attila Zoltán, and József Szabó. 2016. “The Migration Crisis: Representation of a Border Conflict in Hungarian, German and Pan-European Television News Coverage.” Corvinus Journal of Sociology Policy 7 (1): 71–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiss, E. 2016. “‘The Hungarians Have Decided: They Do Not Want Illegal Migrants’: Media Representation of the Hungarian Governmental Anti-immigration Campaign.” Acta Humana – Emberi jogi közlemények 4 (6): 45–77.Google Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid. 2017. “The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Language and Politics 9 (1): 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Korkut, Umut, Andrea Terlizzi, and Dániel Gyollai. 2020. “Migration Controls in Italy and Hungary: From Conditionalized to Domesticized Humanitarianism at the EU Borders.” Journal of Language and Politics 19 (3): 391–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kotzur, Patrick F., Nora Forsbach, and Ulrich Wagner. 2017. “Choose Your Words Wisely: Stereotypes, Emotions, and Action Tendencies Toward Fled People as a Function of the Group Label.” Social Psychology 48 (4): 226–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krennmayr, Tina. 2013. “Top-down Versus Bottom-up Approaches to the Identification of Metaphor in Discourse.” metaphorik.de 241: 7–36.Google Scholar
Kryżanowski, Michał, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ruth Wodak. 2018. “The Mediatization and the Politicization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe.” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGlone, Michael S. 2007. “What is the Explanatory Value of a Conceptual Metaphor?” Language and Communication 27 (2): 109–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McNeil, Robert and Eric Kartsens. 2018. “Hogyan tudósít a média a migrációról és a mobilitásról? [How does the media report on migration and mobility?]” Médiakutató 19 (3–4): 89–117.Google Scholar
Messing, Vera, and Bence Ságvári. 2019. “Still Divided But More Open: Mapping European Attitudes Towards Migration Before and After the Migration Crisis.” Budapest: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung ([URL]).
Monroe, Burt, Michael Colaresi, and Kevin Quinn. 2017. “Fightin’ Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict.” Political Analysis 16 (4): 372–403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Salahshour, Neda. 2016. “Liquid Metaphors As Positive Evaluations: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Migrants in a Daily New Zealand Newspaper.” Discourse, Context & Media 131: 73–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. “‘Like an Animal I Was Treated’: Anti-immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse.” Discourse and Society 10 (2): 191–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schemer, Christian. 2012. “The Influence of News Media on Stereotypic Attitudes Toward Immigrants in a Political Campaign.” Journal of Communication 62 (5): 739–757. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Semino, Elena, Zsófia Demjén, and Jane Demmen. 2018. “An Integrated Approach to Metaphor and Framing in Cognition, Discourse, and Practice, with an Application to Metaphors for Cancer.” Applied Linguistics 39 (5): 625–645.Google Scholar
Silge, Julia, Alex Hayes, and Tyler Schnoebelen. 2020. tidylo: Weighted Tidy Log Odds Ratio. [URL]
Sik, Endre, and Bori Simonovits. 2018. The First Results of the Content Analysis of the Media in the Course of Migration Crisis in Hungary. TÁRKI-CEASEVAL Working Paper No. 35.Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2006. “Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy.” In Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. by A. Stefanowitsch and S. Th. Gries, 1–16. Berlin and New York: Mouton.Google Scholar
Szalai, András, and Gabriella Gőbl. 2015. Securitizing Migration in Contemporary Hungary. CEU Center for EU Enlargement Studies Working Paper, Budapest.Google Scholar
Thibodeau, Paul H., Rose K. Hendricks, and Lera Boroditsky. 2017. “How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21 (11): 852–863. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tóth, Máté, Péter Csatár, and Krisztián Majoros. 2018. “Metaphoric Representations of the Migration Crisis in Hungarian Online Newspapers: A First Approximation.” metaphorik.de 281: 169–199.Google Scholar
van Gorp, Baldwin. 2005. “Where Is the Frame? Victims and Intruders in the Belgian Press Coverage of the Asylum Issue.” European Journal of Communication 20 (4), 484–507. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vicsek, Lilla, Roland Keszi, and Marcell Márkus. 2008. “Representation of Refugees, Asylum-seekers and Refugee Affairs in Hungarian Dailies.” Journal of Identity and Migration Studies 2 (2): 87–107.Google Scholar
Viola, Lorella, and Andreas Musolff (Eds.). 2019. Migration and Media: Discourses about Identities in Crisis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Gonçalves, Isabella
2024. Promoting Hate Speech by Dehumanizing Metaphors of Immigration. Journalism Practice 18:2 ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Yufeng & Dechao Li
2024. Multimodal metaphor (re)framing: a critical analysis of the promotional image of China’s Hubei Province in the post-pandemic era on new media. Social Semiotics 34:2 ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Yufeng & Dennis Tay
2023. Modelability of WAR metaphors across time in cross-national COVID-19 news translation: An insight into ideology manipulation. Lingua 286 ► pp. 103490 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Yan & Wenxing Yang
2023. The landslide’s conceptualizing economic decline and its framing effect: Mandarin evidence. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.