Abstract
This article presents a corpus-driven study of evaluative discourses surrounding asylum seekers in parliamentary debates. It explores how Australian political parties have expressed unfavorable attitudes toward asylum seekers. These attitudes are operationalized by implementing Martin and White’s appraisal framework, which comprises affectual (affect), ethical (judgment), and aesthetic (appreciation) values. The findings reveal that the subcategories of affect, judgment, and appreciation are strategically deployed by both right- and left-wing parties. The right-wing discourse, conveying ethical values, emphasizes the difference between “in” and “out” groups, whereas the left-wing discourse, engaged in affectual values, demonstrates their humanitarian side. The study has also a methodological focus, namely, testing the feasibility of the behavioral profile approach in critical discourse analysis to obtain more replicable and reliable quantitative results. The method consists of the manual annotation of the corpus and multivariate statistical analysis.
Highlights
In contemporary society, the issues concerning asylum seekers are crucial
This study showed how the appraisal framework can be used as an analytical tool to depict attitudes in intraparty discourses.Tthe main objective was to demonstrate the feasibility of the behavioral profile approach to improve critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology
The primary and critical strength of analyzing the results via multivariate statistics is that it enables addressing the complexity of the interactions between different dimensions, permits hypothesis testing, and produces verifiable results to answer research questions (Glynn, 2015), which are not approached using traditional CDA methods
Summary
The issues concerning asylum seekers are crucial. Asylum seekers comprise those who flee persecution in their home countries—some attempting arduous journeys—to reach safe countries wherein they apply for asylum. Politicians contribute to the pervasive attitudes toward asylum seekers expressed by individuals within society They play a fundamental role in the official definition and construction of asylum seekers. The parliament has a prominent role in the democratic process of western countries It is a directly elected body of the government that holds legislative power. The members of the parliament, construct multiple (political) identities, such as representing the public, acting on behalf of the government, defending party interests and beliefs, and so on. They may collaborate with others who are politically similar, confront ideologies, and act to legitimate truth in their actions and reactions to achieve a common view
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