#4033. Argumentative dynamics in representations of migrants and refugees: Evidence from the Italian press during the ‘refugee crisis’

September 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Linguistics and Language;
Communication;
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Abstract:
The research analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (20XX–20XX). We draw on the scholarly agenda employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. We outline a methodological synthesis in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop.
Keywords:
argumentation theory; Argumentum Model of Topics; cognitive linguistics; critical discourse studies; Italian press; metaphors; systemic functional linguistics; ‘refugee crisis’

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