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This paper examines the utility of metaphor as an investigative tool in "long-distance" corpora and discourse studies. I show that metaphor is both important for understanding discourses and useful for diachronic analysis because it allows us to abstract out above the purely lexical level, enabling comparison across contexts where the same concept could be lexicalised differently. The case-study is concerned with the oft-discussed metaphor of migrants are water in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800–2018 and the conventionalisation and evaluative patterns are presented. The findings confirm that the water metaphor has an extensive discourse history regarding how migration is represented in the UK press, but also that evaluations may differ significantly. The paper shows how metaphor can provide a way to find discourse evaluations and framings across different time periods. The use of second-order collocates illustrates how corpus tools can help re-contextualise data to ensure interpretation heeds contemporary framings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adapts O'Halloran's (2010) electronic supplement analysis (ESA) to investigate debates about UK poverty in online newspaper articles and reader responses to those articles. While O'Halloran's method was originally conceived to facilitate close reading, this paper modifies ESA for corpus-based discourse analysis by scaling it up to include multiple texts. I analyse (key-)keywords and concordances to compare seven articles from the Mail Online (2010–2015) with their 2354 reader responses generated using the newspapers' Below the Line (BTL) comments feature. The analysis provides a snapshot of the discourses BTL commenters draw upon when writing about UK poverty. Unemployment, benefits receipt, and single parenthood were repeatedly referred to in the newspaper articles and their comments, but BTL commenters also drew on personal narratives and (fictional) anecdotes to index notions of flawed consumerism, scroungers, and the deserving and undeserving poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies one of the key-metaphors that has dominated British EU-debates for the past 25 years, i.e. the slogan, Britain at the heart of Europe. The discourse career of this metaphor up to the Brexit referendum shows a decline in its affirmative, optimistic use, and a converse increase of deriding uses to the point of declaring the heart of Europe irredeemably diseased, dead, non-existent or rotten. We argue that these changes in the metaphor scenario of the heart of Europe concept helped to entice the British public to integrate the information supplied by pro-Brexit campaigners into a narrative of a dying EU, which motivated their voting preferences. Even statements that were exposed as factually wrong or implausible before the Brexit referendum were still accepted as fitting the narrative and thus considered as more reliable than unframed pieces of counter-information supplied by the Brexit critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]