Migration Discourse Preceding the Great Migrant Crisis in the Croatian and English Language – A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of adjectival and verbal collocates of the words refugee, asylum seeker, immigrant and migrant are presented. The research was conducted using two corpora available on the Sketch Engine interface - hrWaC and enTenTen2015. The aim of the research was to list the 15 most typical adjectival and verbal collocates of the aforementioned nodes in the Croatian and English language and compare them. The critical discourse analysis included in-depth reading of concordance lines including the extracted collocations in the two languages, as well as defining the discourse surrounding them in a more qualitative way. The findings suggest that prior to the outbreak of the 2015 migrant crisis the discourse surrounding the four groups of people was judgemental and prejudiced, unwelcoming, and sometimes even extremist, but that the Croatian language discourse was less xenophobic than the English language discourse.