It’s Raining Immigrants! HELLelujah!: The Metaphors of Immigration in Early American Magazines (1828–1959)

Stemming from a conviction that the same phenomenon can be construed differently by different cognisers, metaphors used “reflect[ing] and effect[ing] underlying construal operations which are ideological in nature” (Hart 2011, 2), the present paper investigates how the conceptualisation and linguistic construction of IMMIGRANTS changed over time, forwarding a convenient representation of reality. To that end, the study marries the Cognitive Linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004; Hart 2010; 2011; 2015) with the multifactorial usage-feature analysis (Glynn 2010). The results have shown that in the times of increased migration IMMIGRANTS were objectified, their otherness foregrounded through appropriate discursive strategies and topoi. Curbing immigration in later periods contributed to an observable shift in the linguistic representation of the immigrant out-group.