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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 183–202

Chapter 8
The great wall of Europe

Verbal and multimodal portrayals of Europe’s migrant crisis in Serbian media discourse

Complementing the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004; Musolff 2004, 2011) with research on multimodality from a cognitive viewpoint (Bounegru and Forceville 2011), in this chapter we deal with both linguistic and multimodal instantiations of the wall metaphor in Serbian media texts published in 2015 in an attempt to identify the most frequent metaphor scenarios modelled around this concept in a critical period during the European migrant crisis. Two major metaphor scenarios (Musolff 2006) triggered by the wall metaphor arise – fortress europe and berlin wall, both appearing to be instrumental in communicating the notions of marginalisation and non-belongingness to the EU space, emanating from verbally and visually constructed image of both migrants and the Serbian nation.

Keywords: metaphor scenario, multimodality, migrant crisis, EU, Serbia, WALL metaphor, FORTRESS EUROPE scenario, BERLIN WALL scenario
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Data collection and method
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The fortress europe scenario
    • 4.2The berlin wall scenario
    • 4.3A multimodal portrayal of the fortress europe and berlin wall scenarios
      • 4.3.1The multimodal fortress europe scenario
      • 4.3.2The multimodal berlin wall scenario
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.09sil
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