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.

在过去的十年里，法国右翼和极右翼通过他们的言论促进了对移民的非人化愿景。在本文中，我们认为这是涉及移民相关词汇的历时语言过程的结果。显着的频率增加使其[+人类]特征的语义逐渐褪色，最终将其功能重新分类为非参考类别的简单触发因素，其中移民和恐怖主义，以及欧盟和全球化，统称为“其他”。通过对马琳勒庞和其他法国右翼政治家的 5689 条推文的语料库中与移民相关的词汇进行定量、语义和分布分析，结合语料库方法和批判性话语分析，我们通过不同阶段的实际含义展示了移民与几个不相关主题之间的关联。我们发现与迁移相关的词典在列表和并行中出现了一种强大的趋势，其语义-语用功能特别是暗示在上下文中解释的类别成员之间的关系。我们声称，这些结构是公共话语中操纵性类别的出现、传播和巩固以及它们在追随右翼政治议程的特别时尚。