“Re-collocantig”Lampedusa as the “imaginary” threshold of Europe

Moving from the assumption that the construction of an alleged European identity is reinforced by the construction of “borders” and “barriers”, the paper will investigate the collocation of some keywords and key collocates in the representation of the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck (also called “boat-migrants”) in a corpus of Italian and English TV news. Via the adoption of a multimodal corpus-assisted approach (Baldry, Thibault 2008; Kress 2010) the paper will start analysing the metaphors linked to the social construction of Lampedusa as the “soglia” of Europe drawing also from CDA and SFL which is intermingled with the perspective of the imaginary.