Metaphorically speaking: a mixed-methods study of user-generated discourse and metaphors around migration.

This study aimed to understand and to uncover the metaphors employed by users when discussing migration in year 2017 and in year 2020. In particular, the content here observed was selected among the comments written “below the line” of articles by the conservative Italian newspaper Il Giornale. The discourse presented in the comment was particularly interesting to this study, since it represents a type of language that is spontaneous and fluid, by almost reproducing orality in written form (Pistolesi, 2014: 365). The spontaneity of comments can uncover the true feelings of commenters through the Online Disinhibition Effect (Suler, 2014: 321); moreover, comments have been observed as being cues which influence readers (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2019), which explains their relevance in influencing public opinion. The study of metaphor was here carried out in order to reveal the implications of discourse, since in Steen’s definition metaphorical meaning is indirect, and is understood through similarity and comparison (2007). In this perspective, words are seen as having both a direct (literal) and indirect (figurative) meaning, which can be understood only through observation. For this reason, a mixed-methods discourse analysis was deemed the most appropriate way to detect the presence of metaphors in user-generated content: quantitative approaches can detect repetition, while qualitative approaches can help understand the framings provided by metaphors. Particularly, the method here employed combines the observation of keywords and collocates, which were employed to identify useful tokens describing the general themes presented in the corpora; the tokens were then analyzed through the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007).