The representation of Polish migrants in the UK as constructed in the Polish press

Małgorzata Fabiszak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)

The paper is an application of a Blending Theory - informed Critical Discourse Analysis, as suggested in Chilton (2005). It attempts to show how cognitive linguistics can enrich the critical analysis of the media construction of reality (see, e.g. Fairclough 2003). The data for analysis come form the major national quality newspapers Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, Trybuna in the period after Polish accession to the EU. A number of articles downloaded form the Internet archives of these newspapers will undergo a qualitative analysis (in the sense of Charteris-Black 2004 and Musolff 2004) The paper will focus on the asymmetry of the representation of the self and the other and frame shifting in the discourse on migration. The concept of frame shifting goes back to Coulson's (2001) analysis of American media discourse on abortion and shows how the construal of counterfactual blends is used in an attempt to convince the interlocutor to the self narrative construal of reality. The present paper aims at answering the question what cognitive and discoursal strategies are used in the Polish press discourse on the labour migration to the UK. It will focus

References:

Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.

Chilton, Paul. 2005. "Missing Links in Mainstream CDA: Modules, Blends, and the Critical Instinct". In Ruth Wodak (ed.). A new research agenda in critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity. John Benjamins. ( www.uea.ac.uk/~r012/ )

Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps. Frame shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction. Cambridge: CUP.

Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing discourse. London - New York: Routledge.

Musolff, Andreas. 2004. Metaphor and political discourse. Palgrave macmillan.