'Go back to where you came from' - the lexical semantics of 'refugee', 'asylum seeker',

and 'boat people' in Australian English

Andrea Schalley

(Griffith U)

Issues surrounding immigration and immigration policy occupy an important position in

Australian political discourse. The terms 'refugee', 'asylum seeker', and 'boat people' are of

particular prominence in the nation’s discourse, and are widely used by politicians, journal-

ists, activists, and in day-to-day conversation among Australians. However, a lexico-semantic

study of the terms has not been carried out to date. In this talk, we fill this gap by proposing a

semantic analysis for them.

The study is based on a corpus created from online comments to the Australian television

program Go Back To Where You Came From (Season 1, SBS 2011). After introducing the

data and analytical framework, we discuss the terms’ lexical semantics. Each term canonically

represents a specific node in a cross-connected network of ‘translocant’ concepts, but may in

context also be applied to neighbouring nodes that themselves lack a lexicalisation. While the

terms are thus seemingly used “in an apparently interchangeable way” (O’Doherty and

Lecouteur, 2007), our analysis instead emphasises the influence of the underlying conceptual

structure and the resulting constrained plasticity of nominal meaning in context.