“Migrants and the EU”. The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse

Abstract

The French right and far-right have promoted a dehumanized vision of the migrants through their discourse in the last ten years. In this paper, we argue that this is the outcome of a diachronic linguistic process involving migration-related lexicon. A remarkable frequency increase enabled the progressive semantic bleaching of its [+human] trait and finally its functional recategorization as a simple trigger of a non-referential category where migrants and terrorism, but also the European Union and globalization, conflate to generically designate the “other”. Combining corpus methods and critical discourse analysis through the quantitative, semantic, and distributional analysis of migration-related lexicon in a corpus of 5689 tweets by Marine Le Pen and other right-wing French politicians, we show the association between migration and several unrelated topics through pragmatic implicature at various stages. We find a robust tendency of migration-related lexicon to occur in lists and parallelisms, whose sematic-pragmatic function is specifically to implicate a relation between the members of a category construed in context. We claim that these structures are the main culprit for the emergence, the spread, and the entrenchment of manipulative categories in public discourse and for their expansion in ad hoc fashion, following the right's political agenda.