Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > A corpus-based approach to discourses of refuge...
View graph of relations

A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts.

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2005
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Language and Politics
Issue number2
Volume4
Number of pages30
Pages (from-to)197-226
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

A corpus-based analysis of discourses of refugees and asylum seekers was carried out on data taken from a range of British newspapers and texts from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website, both published in 2003. Concordances of the terms refugee(s) and asylum seeker(s) were examined and grouped along patterns which revealed linguistic traces of discourses. Discourses which framed refugees as packages, invaders, pests or water were found in newspaper texts, although there were also cases of negative discourses found in the UNHCR texts, revealing how difficult it is to disregard dominant discourses. Lexical choice was found to be an essential aspect of maintaining discourses of asylum seekers — collocational analyses of terms like failed vs. rejected revealed the underlying attitudes of the writers towards the subject.