Tropologia della discriminazione. La figura dello straniero nel discorso sociale italiano alle soglie del XXI secolo

If we think that metaphors are a powerful tool to conceptualize the world, it is already true that in some cases metaphors can help to build reality, as they crystallize social thought in stereotypical and distorted forms. Therefore, in social and political discourse metaphors are systematically used to orient the manner in which people conceptualize human groups, societies and cultures. When it comes to immigrants, often such stereotypes evoke disasters and calamities. In this paper I have two distinct, but strictly related goals. First of all I shall analyze a prototypical case of xenophobic discrimination in news reports, characterized by an extensive and crucial use of metaphors and metonymies. Secondly I shall outline a typology of metaphors which have been used (and abused) in Italian media discourse during the last two decades. My classification seeks to identify the domains that act as a source of metaphors. In the first case I shall adopt the Reisigl and Wodak (2001) discourse-historical approach, while in the second case the theoretical frameworkis the theory of conceptual metaphor developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980).