Il migrante immaginario: analisi di una rappresentazione sociale attraverso Twitter

This contribution consists of two parts. The first is a corpus-based survey on a corpus of tweets obtained from the archive of Twitter by searching for keywords within predefined time spans. Purpose of the investigation is to verify what terms are most commonly used today in Italy to define the people who arrived in the past three years through the Strait of Sicily on makeshift means of transport. In the second part of the research, the lexical evolution will be subsumed under Moscovici (1976; 1984; 1997)’s framework of social representations, through which I will argue the different designations of the migrant are the expressions of different forms of social representations of this figure, more or less oriented and stereotyped. Finally, the imaginary will emerge as the thrust which triggers the evolutionary lexical process. The social imaginary theorized by Castoriadis (1975; 1988), will be, then, identified as the force that continually creates new senses for words.