A Lexical Semantics for Refugee, Asylum Seeker and Boat People in Australian English

Abstract

The terms refugee, asylum seeker and boat people are of particular prominence in the Australian discourse surrounding immigration policy, and are widely used in day-to-day conversation among Australians. Despite their frequency of use, a lexico-semantic study of the terms has not been carried out to date. This paper fills this gap by proposing a semantic analysis of them. The study is based on a corpus created from online comments to the Australian television programme Go Back To Where You Came From (Season 1, SBS 2011). After introducing the data and analytical framework—object-oriented semantics—we discuss the terms’ lexical semantics. While the discussion of immigration issues is emotionally laden, our results suggest that the default semantics of the terms do not include evaluative components. Rather, speakers tend to evaluate the agreed-upon semantic specifications differently depending on their political views. We show how each term represents a specific node in a network of concepts for translocating individuals, but may in context also be applied to neighbouring nodes that lack a lexicalization. While the terms are seemingly used interchangeably, our analysis instead emphasizes the influence of the underlying conceptual structure and the resulting constrained plasticity of nominal meaning in context.