“Migrants and the EU”. The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse☆
Introduction
During the electoral campaign for the European elections in 2019, the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen tweeted:
The goal of this work is to describe the discursive and linguistic dynamics that have made it acceptable for a party leader to compare a human being to a wind turbine.
As observed by Pietrandrea (2019a, b), from a psychosocial point of view, the process that has led to this result can be described as a “dehumanization” of the migrant. Following Kelman (1973), dehumanisation can be technically defined as the psychological process that prevents from considering the members of a group properly as human beings, that is, as autonomous individuals, having the same rights and the same needs as other humans.
In order to identify the linguistic correlates of this dehumanization process, we collected, annotated and studied around 6000 occurrences of words related to migration, i.e., words having -migr- as their lexical root (henceforth migr-lexicon), in a corpus of 5689 tweets produced by 10 right and far-right political personalities between 2011 and 2019. Studying this corpus, we observed that the dehumanization process resulted in (and was driven by) a diachronic formal and semantic change in the use of migr-lexicon. At the formal level, migr-lexicon has become progressively more constrained as far as its textual distribution is concerned. At the semantic level, this process has consisted in a gradual bleaching and functional recategorization, which led to the demotion of its [+human] semantic component.
As we will see, such a process has ultimately led to the rise and spread in public discourse of a recurrent construction: a derogatory categorizing list, in which migr-lexicon is not used to refer to men and women experiencing migration, but rather as a general extension of the category of the enemy, or, to use Van Dijk's (2006) terminology, the “other”. Interestingly enough, at each stage of this process, various strategies of implicit construction of meanings have been exploited.
The article is organized as follows: in Section 2, we present a quick analysis of the historical-political background, aimed at identifying recent history events and tendencies which proved relevant for the debate on immigration as well as social and political topics on the agenda of French right. Once the background is set, we describe, in Section 3, our methodology and our data. In Section 4, we study the rise in frequency of the discourse on migration as well as its linguistic effects, namely its semantic bleaching. In Section 5, we analyse the distribution and the evolution of migr-lexicon semantic modifiers, which were used to impose a one-sided, negative and emotional characterization of immigration and migrants in discourse. In Section 6, we study the distribution of migr-lexicon in the discursive context of their tweets, by focusing on the distribution of hashtags. In Section 7 and Section 8, we analyse the textual, syntactic, and semantic distribution of migr-lexicon within tweet-internal parallelisms and list structures. A concluding discussion of the most relevant findings is presented in Section 9.
Section snippets
The historical and political context
The civil war in Syria set the background for the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) between 2014 and 2015, and for its retreat between 2016 and 2017. ISIS attracted young Middle Easterners and Europeans to its battlegrounds and fuelled war through a series of terrorist attacks in European cities. France was hard hit by terrorist attacks between 2012 and 2020.
In the meantime, Europe experienced an increasing migration wave from Asia, Middle East and Africa: one million migrants
Methodology
The recent diachrony of migr-lexicon is a case in point of how the dynamics of linguistic evolution couples with societal and political implications. Its study therefore calls for a combination of methods, as suggested by Baker et al. (2008). We adopt here a corpus-based, diachronic, critical analysis of discourse. On one hand, as the processes under scrutiny largely took place on the web, we are faced with an unprecedented amount of data and corpus linguistics methods are needed to uncover the
Appeals to speak out: implicating the link between migration and terrorism
In the immediate aftermath of the Toulouse attacks, right-wing politicians, and in primis President Sarkozy and his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen, both candidates for presidential investiture, multiplied the appeals not to leave migration aside in the debates and to speak out about it.(2) On ne peut pas continuer à faire campagne comme s'il ne s’était rien passé. Il faut plus de gravité, plus de profondeur, plus de vérité. Nous n'avons pas le droit d'esquiver le débat. Les événements récents
Distribution of modifiers
One strand of our diachronic distributional analysis was focused, quite classically – see for example Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008, Khosravinik et al., 2012, Van Dijk, 2015, 2018, Allen, 2016, Galyga et al., 2019 - on the nature and the variation of the modifiers associated to the NP immigration. In a cognitive semantics perspective, modifiers activate frames (Fillmore, 1982; Lakoff, 2002, 2004) that are blended in the conceptual representation of the NP via a cognitive operation of conceptual
Hashtags
Another strand of our distributional analysis took hashtags into account. We observed whether migr-lexicon was hashtagged (8) or not, and if it was, we identified the other words hashtagged in the same tweet (9).(8) Le Pen, M. [@MLP_officiel]. (2015-12-04). http://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/statuses/67279015356019916. Voilà le vrai visage de l'UMP-@lesRepublicains: complice de l'installation massive des #migrants dans la région! This is the true face of the @UMO-@lesRepublicains: accomplice of the
Lists
Around 2015 a new strategy began to increase in frequency in our corpus: the occurrence of migr-lexicon in list structures. In this section, we will briefly define this structure in syntactic terms, we will provide a semantic and pragmatic interpretation for it and we will show how and with which pragmatic effects the migr-lexicon interacts with it.
The semantic evolution of list structures
In order to trace the evolution of the lexicon associated with migr-lexicon in proper list structures and to find out which concepts have progressively conflated in the ad hoc category under scrutiny, we analysed the significant collocates of the word immigration in the and/or pattern, computed by WordSketch on SketchEngine. The ranking based on the LogDice score is presented in Table 7. In the analysis, we considered the variation in the highest positions and the significant new entries in the
Concluding remarks
Let us quickly retrace the most important results of our work: in the last ten years, the French right and far-right have sparked hate speech towards migration and migrants. They succeeded in achieving this goal by insinuating a dehumanized image of the migrant into the public discourse, through a careful use of implicit contents. First, they suggested the existence of a relationship between immigration and terrorism, establishing thereby, as is typical of racist discourse (Van Dijk, 2015), the
Paola Pietrandrea is professor of Language Sciences at the University of Lille, France. She taught in the universities of Roma Tre, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Paris Ouest Nanterre, Tours. She authored several publications on the co-construction of shared epistemic judgments in interaction and she currently works on the democratization of public debate.
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Paola Pietrandrea is professor of Language Sciences at the University of Lille, France. She taught in the universities of Roma Tre, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Paris Ouest Nanterre, Tours. She authored several publications on the co-construction of shared epistemic judgments in interaction and she currently works on the democratization of public debate.
Elena Battaglia is doctoral candidate in Italian Linguistics at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. She focuses her research interests on the categorization of information source in face-to-face interaction.
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The present work has been developed in the framework of Euro.Disc, a bi-lateral project funded, within the framework of the Herbert Curien Partnerships, by Campus France and the Università Italo-Francese, coordinated by Paola Pietrandrea and Andrea Sansò (2018–2019). We wish to thank Adelina Stoian and Jeon Sangwan for their invaluable help in the collection of data.