The Historical Thesaurus of Migration: An exploration of context-driven approaches to capture semantic change
University of Sheffield (United Kingdom)
Objectives: While the phenomenon of human migration has been researched from a historical and sociopolitical standpoint, there is still a lot to study in regard to how language change reflects the shift in perception towards migration. Corpus studies, particularly diachronic corpus studies, provide the foundation and the tools for the analysis of semantic change by allowing researchers to gather data on the frequency of salient lexical words over a certain period of time. This case starts with the colonial period in Mexico in the 16th century, progressing to the 19th century Irish transatlantic migrations and ends in the 20th century with the US-Mexico Bracero Program. This selection facilitates a diachronic perspective while also allowing for the diversification of the corpora through the exploration of texts in both Spanish and English. The discourses derived from each context also supply insightful data for dissecting the relationship between migration, policy and colonialism through the lens of semantic change. The result is a research project that aims to understand how the lexicon associated with migration (e.g. alien, settler or citizen) changed across time and languages by analyzing the semantics of the historical contexts and identifying lexical items that are unique to each period. This is achieved through a combination of methods drawn from corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics and discourse analysis that capture broad semantic changes and account for data imbalances while also being context-sensitive and maintaining the interpretability of extra-linguistic factors. Main outputs of this project will include a migration taxonomy which will establish the framework for an overarching diachronic exploration of the data and three case studies which aim to explore a particular concept, or term that is contextually relevant to each of the pre-established groups can provide further insight into the evolution of the migration discourse.
Expected results include:
1) A migration taxonomy which will serve as a data visualisation tool and general framework for the analysis
2) A detailed and comprehensive account on the principles of thesaurus and taxonomy creation for the study of semantic change
3) Three case studies exploring insightful terms into evolution of migration from a discursive and semantic perspective
Planned Secondments: Glasgow (Year 1-2, 3 months; thesaurus tools and lexicography development); Meertens Institute (Year 2-3, 3 months; a study of climate concepts over time). Also visiting: Netherlands eScience Center, KULEUVEN.