Submersion and Porosity: Waterphors and immigration in contemporary French and American political speeches

The objective of this article is to study the conceptualization of IMMIGRATION with the use of Waterphors, namely metaphors that have WATER as a source domain. This work relies on cognitive linguistics and more specifically on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff/ Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2021). The corpus is composed of American and French speeches delivered between 2015 and 2020 by Biden, Clinton, Le Pen, Macron and Trump, for a total of 1,365,504 tokens and 179 IMMIGRATION Waterphors. The results show that two categories of Waterphors can be distinguished: WATER metaphors that directly conceptualize immigrant as WATER and those that represent the borders as COLANDERS. Regardless of the language, IMMIGRATION metaphors are axiologically negative but Trump and Le Pen tend to push the degree of negativity to its maximum.