Urn NBN Fi Uef-20211283

UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
PHILOSOPHICAL FACULTY
SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
MDP in Linguistic Sciences
Sociolinguistics: Language Contacts and Language Policy
Antonia Stavridou
A corpus-based discourse analysis of the discourse patterns towards RASIM
in the British news sources before and after the Brexit referendum
MA Thesis
August 2021
ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Faculty School
Philosophical Faculty School of Humanities
Author
Antonia Stavridou
Title
A corpus-based discourse analysis of the discourse patterns towards RASIM in the British news sources
before and after the Brexit referendum.
Main subject Level Date Number of pages

Linguistic Data Pro gradu -thesis x August 13, 83 pages
Sciences Sivuainetutkielma 2021
Kandidaatin tutkielma
Aineopintojen tutkielma
Abstract
Media has always played an important role in people’s everyday lives, often influencing their opinion
on different topics. One of those topics is the one related to refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and
migrants (RASIM) and it is no secret that the discourses towards those groups have been rather
negative in the past (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013). Previous research regarding the language
used in the newspapers revealed many ways, in which newspapers have tried to influence attitudes
towards these groups (Aluthman 2018; William 2016) Therefore, the purpose of this research paper was
to investigate the patterns of speech regarding RASIM before and after the Brexit referendum in British
news sources, in order to examine whether there are any significant differences in the portrayal of these
groups which seem to have played an important role in the Brexit decision as they were a big topic in
the Brexit campaign (Watt 2016). Consequently, this research tried to answer the following questions:
1. What kind of linguistic constructions are used with regards to refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants,
and migrants?
2. Do the lemmas present semantic differences in their discourses or are the terms used
interchangeably?
3. Are there any quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the lemmas before and after the
referendum?
In order to answer those questions, two corpora of 1,447 news texts in total, were created using the
NOW Corpus (News on the Web) and in particular, they were divided into two sub-corpora: a) pre-
referendum corpus (1 January 2013–23 June 2016) and b) post-referendum corpus (24 June 2016–31
December 2019). Following a combination of the methodology regarding collocations and
concordances as it was described by Baker (2006: 92–93, 119–120) this study used the most frequent
collocates of the lemmas as well as their concordances to discover the discourses towards these groups
in the pre-referendum period and compare them to the ones found in the post-referendum period.
According to the results of this study, the discourses towards RASIM present themes and discourses
which show that the terms are sometimes used synonymously (especially the term migrant which acts
as an umbrella term). Those themes belong to mostly negative discourses, although some positive ones
revolving around the struggles or contributions of RASIM are present as well. Some of these discourses
remain in the post-referendum era but they have decreased in frequency (based on collocates), although
the interchangeability of the terms, especially for the trio migrant-refugee-asylum seeker, makes the
interpretation of the changes in frequencies more difficult to interpret.
Keywords
corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, concordance, collocations, Brexit, immigrants, refugees,
migrants, asylum seekers, minority groups
ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Tiedekunta Osasto
Filosofinen tiedekunta Humanistinen osasto
Tekijät
Antonia Stavridou
Työn nimi
A corpus-based discourse analysis of the discourse patterns towards RASIM in the British
news sources before and after the Brexit referendum.
Pääaine Työn laji Päivämäärä Sivumäärä
Linguistic Data Pro gradu -thesis x 13.08.2021 83 sivua

Sciences Sivuainetutkielma
Kandidaatin tutkielma
Aineopintojen tutkielma
Tiivistelmä
Medialla on aina ollut tärkeä rooli ihmisten jokapäiväisessä elämässä, ja se on usein vaikuttanut heidän
mielipiteisiinsä eri aiheista. Yksi näistä aiheista liittyy pakolaisiin, turvapaikanhakijoihin,
maahanmuuttajiin ja siirtolaisiin (RASIM), eikä ole mikään salaisuus, että näihin ryhmiin kohdistuvat
keskustelut ovat olleet sävyltään aiemmin melko negatiivisia (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013).
Aikaisemmat sanomalehdissä käytetyn kielen tutkimukset paljastivat monia tapoja, joilla sanomalehdet
ovat yrittäneet vaikuttaa näihin ryhmiin kohdistuneisiin asenteisiin (Aluthman 2018; William 2016).
Tämän vuoksi tämän tutkimustyön tarkoituksena oli tutkia RASIMia koskevia puhemalleja brittiläisissä
lehdissä ja uutissivustolla ennen ja jälkeen Brexit-kansanäänestyksen ja tarkastella, esiintyikö tavassa
miten nämä ryhmät on lehdissä ja uutissivustolla kuvattu merkittäviä eroja. RASIM-ryhmillä näyttää
olleen tärkeä rooli Brexit-päätöksessä, koska ne nousivat suureksi aiheeksi Brexit-kampanjassa (Watt
2016). Tämän vuoksi tässä tutkimuksessa yritettiin vastata seuraaviin kysymyksiin:
1. Millaisia kielellisiä rakenteita käytetään pakolaisten, turvapaikanhakijoiden, maahanmuuttajien ja
siirtolaisten yhteydessä?
2. Käykö diskurssista ilmi lemmojen semanttiset erot vai käytetäänkö termejä toistensa synonyymeinä?
3. Onko lemmoissa havaittavissa määrällisiä ja laadullisia eroja ennen kansanäänestystä ja sen jälkeen?
Vastauksia näihin kysymyksiin lähdettiin etsimään luomalla NOW Corpus (News on the Web) -
sovelluksella yhteensä 1447 tekstin kokonaisuuksia ja erityisesti jakamalla ne kahteen ajanjaksoon: a)
01.01.2013–23.06.2016 ja b) 24.06.2016–31.12.2019. Noudattamalla Bakerin (2006: 92–93, 119–120)
kuvaamaa kollokaatioita ja konkordansseja koskevan metodologian yhdistelmää löydettiin tässä
tutkimuksessa lemmien yleisimpien kollokaattien ja niiden konkordanssien avulla näihin ryhmiin
liittyvät keskustelut kansanäänestystä edeltävältä kaudelta ja verrattiin niitä kansanäänestyksen
jälkeiseen aikaan.
Tämän tutkimuksen tulosten mukaan RASIMia koskevat keskustelut tuovat esiin teemoja ja diskursseja,
jotka osoittavat, että termejä käytetään joskus synonyymeinä (erityisesti termi maahanmuuttaja, joka
toimii kattoterminä). Nämä teemat kuuluvat enimmäkseen negatiivisiin diskursseihin, vaikka joitakin
positiivisia teemoja, jotka pyörivät RASIMin kamppailujen tai osallisuuden ympärillä, on myös läsnä.
Jotkut näistä keskusteluista jäävät kansanäänestyksen jälkeiselle alueelle, mutta niiden esiintymistiheys
on vähentynyt (kollakaattien perusteella), vaikka termien keskinäinen vaihdettavuus erityisesti
maahanmuuttaja-pakolais-turvapaikanhakijakolmikolle vaikeuttaa taajuuksien muutosten tulkintaa.
Avainsanat
korpuslingvistiikka, kriittinen diskurssianalyysi, konkordanssi, kollokaatiot, Brexit, maahanmuuttajat,
pakolaiset, siirtolaiset, turvapaikanhakijat, vähemmistöryhmät
Contents
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1
2. Theoretical background ......................................................................................................................... 4
2.1. Corpus studies and (critical) discourse analysis ................................................................................ 4
2.1.1. Corpora and corpus linguistics .................................................................................................. 4
2.1.2. Critical discourse analysis ......................................................................................................... 6
2.1.3. Combining corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis: A corpus-assisted critical
discourse analysis ...................................................................................................................................... 8
2.2. Corpus Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 9
2.2.1. Collocation analysis ...................................................................................................................... 9
2.2.2. Concordance analysis .................................................................................................................. 11
2.2.3. Frequency and statistical tests ..................................................................................................... 12
2.3. News media and RASIM ................................................................................................................. 13
2.3.1. Definitions of RASIM ................................................................................................................. 13
2.3.2. News press and the shaping of opinions...................................................................................... 15
2.3.3. The portrayal of RASIM in the media ..................................................................................... 17
2.3.4. RASIM in numbers ..................................................................................................................... 18
2.4. Brexit ............................................................................................................................................... 21
2.4.1. Brexit and immigration ............................................................................................................... 21
2.4.2. Brexit aftermath and relation with the current thesis .................................................................. 22
3. Methodology ....................................................................................................................................... 24
3.1. Aims and research questions. .......................................................................................................... 24
3.2. Material ........................................................................................................................................... 25
3.2.1. The NOW Corpus........................................................................................................................ 25
3.2.1.1. Advantages of the NOW Corpus ............................................................................................. 26
3.2.1.2. Disadvantages of the NOW Corpus ........................................................................................ 26
3.3. Methodology ................................................................................................................................... 29
3.3.1. Analysis of the corpus through the use of collocations ........................................................... 29
3.3.2. Analysis of the corpus-based on concordance analysis. .......................................................... 31
4. Results ................................................................................................................................................. 33
4.1. Pre-Referendum period (2013–2016) .............................................................................................. 33
4.1.1. Immigrant ............................................................................................................................ 33
4.1.1.1. Collocational analysis...................................................................................................... 33
4.1.1.2. Concordance analysis ...................................................................................................... 38
4.1.2. Migrant ................................................................................................................................ 40
4.1.3. Refugee................................................................................................................................ 46
4.1.4. Asylum Seeker .................................................................................................................... 52
4.2. Post-Referendum Period (2016–2019) ............................................................................................ 57
4.2.1. Immigrant ............................................................................................................................ 57
4.2.2. Migrant ................................................................................................................................ 62
4.2.3. Refugee................................................................................................................................ 67
4.2.4. Asylum Seeker .................................................................................................................... 72
5. Discussion ........................................................................................................................................... 76
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 79
References ................................................................................................................................................... 80
1. Introduction
Media have always played an important role in shaping opinions and in many cases, it is believed
that printed media have managed to create and set agendas on certain topics (Baker, Gabrielatos,
and McEnery 2013: 5–6). One of these topics refers to immigrants, migrants, refugees, and asylum
seekers and they have often tried to provoke anti-foreign and racist messages through the
phraseology they have used (ibid).
Therefore, the goal of this particular study is to research the discourse patterns related to refugees,
asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) in the United Kingdom and in particular the
ones found before and after the Brexit referendum, from UK online news sources, in order to draw
a comparison which should reveal two things: first what kind of discourse patterns are related to
these groups of people and second whether there are any changes to those patterns and/or whether
any new patterns are emerging after the referendum. Therefore, this research aims to answer the
following questions:
1. What kind of linguistic constructions1 are used in the discourses regarding refugees, asylum
seekers, immigrants, and migrants?
2. Do the lemmas2 present semantic differences in their discourses or are the terms used
interchangeably?
3. Are there any quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the lemmas before and after
the referendum?
The reasons this particular topic was chosen, were because it had been very relevant in the last
century since there are a lot of people, who either for political, personal, financial, or professional
reasons decide to leave their home country and move to another one. Being a member of the EU
facilitates that movement a lot and UK had received a great number of immigrants over the years.
At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment started to rise in Britain, and it was one of the reasons
1
“A linguistic construction is prototypically a unit of language that comprises multiple linguistic elements used
together for a relatively coherent communicative function, with sub-functions being performed by the elements as
well”(Siegler, Kuhn, and Tomasello, n.d.:8).
2
“A set of lexical forms having the same stem and belonging to the same major word class, differing only in
inﬂection and/or spelling” (Francis and Kučera 1982: 1 as quoted in Baker, Hardie, and McEnery 2006: 104).
1
behind the Brexit decision. In particular, those in favor of Brexit hoped to regain control of their
borders by leaving the EU, and thus no longer having to mandatorily accept all the immigrants
coming from other EU countries (Vote Leave Campaign, 2016). For that reason, they called for a
referendum, the result of which indicated that the British people wanted to leave the EU.
However, Brexit had remained a current affair for a long time after the referendum because of the
long process of negotiations regarding the official exit of the UK and also because of the political
turbulences it caused within the UK. Over three years had passed after the referendum result and
the process of the exit of the UK was still taking place, with the leaders of the UK requesting
extension after extension until an agreement on the Brexit deal was finally achieved (Mueller
2019). UK has now officially left the EU (31 January 2020) but the deadline for the transition
period and the negotiations was the 31st of December 2020 (ibid).
Consequently, it could be very interesting to conduct research on the discourses regarding the
immigrants, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers after the referendum and compare it with the
pre-Brexit discourses in order to see if there are any differences since it seems that some people
may have regretted the outcome of the referendum (Helm 2019) and as previous research suggests
the relationship between press and readers is interconnected, with one affecting the other (Baker,
Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 6).
Furthermore, as in my Bachelor thesis, a similar topic was studied (Analysis of the hate speech
toward immigrants and refugees in Greece), this type of research and its related topics are all
familiar and they are still of great interest to me, which now are going to be further studied but in
a different context this time.
However, it is important to note the delimitations of this study. As will be discussed in methodology
in chapter three, the tool which is used for the current research (NOW Corpus) has quite a few
disadvantages which therefore create several delimitations. For example, complicated searches
give errors (getting a collocate list for asylum seeker based on MI and frequency for instance),
which makes a more refined analysis difficult. Moreover, the interpretation of the results is
subjective and might differ from speaker to speaker, especially since this analysis is made from the
point of view of a non-native English speaker who also has not lived in the UK.
2
The thesis is structured as follows. The theoretical background of this thesis is presented in chapter
2. In particular, corpus linguistics and critical discourses analysis (CDA) and their methodology
are briefly described in sections 2.1 and 2.2 respectively. The topic of RASIM in the news media,
along with previous studies on RASIM and the topic of Brexit are presented in sections 2.3 and 2.4
respectively. In chapter 3, the methodology and the data which have been used in this study are
described and explained. In chapter 4, the results of the study are presented, emphasizing in
qualitative and when possible, the quantitative differences among the two sub-corpora. Finally, in
chapters 5 and 6, a discussion regarding the findings and a conclusion of the topic are made.
3
2. Theoretical background
2.1. Corpus studies and (critical) discourse analysis
2.1.1. Corpora and corpus linguistics
While many branches of linguistics usually imply through their names what the scope of their study
is and what aspect of the language they are studying, corpus linguistics differs in that sense. For
instance, in sociolinguistics studies, the researchers are examining the connection or relation
between language and society (Lindquist and Levin 2018: 1), corpus linguistics, however, does not
reveal what is being studied, rather what the material of the study is, that is a corpus (or more
corpora). Corpus linguistics is therefore a methodology which researchers of various linguistic
fields can use to study the language.
Corpus linguistics might be useful to a number of various language disciplines since, according to
Baker (2006: 1) quoting McEnery and Wilson (1996: 1), corpus linguistics is “the study of language
based on examples of real life language use”. However, in corpus linguistics, these real-life
language examples come from large bodies of (electronically encoded) texts, which allow for a
quantitative approach to the field of linguistics (ibid). In addition, the bigger the corpora, the more
confident the researcher can be in making assumptions and generalizations about the language
under study (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 25).
The advantages of corpus linguistics are plenty. Firstly, as above-mentioned, due to the quantitative
nature of the corpora (as long as the corpora are large enough), the results can be considered more
“credible” compared to those coming from only a few texts (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery
2013: 25). Secondly, since frequency is one of the main components of corpus linguistics, as will
be discussed in section 2.2., the researcher can have a better understanding of the frequency with
which an expression or word is being used (ibid.). This is rather important since according to
Fairclough (1989: 54, as quoted in ibid.: 26), "[a] single text on its own is quite insignificant: the
effects of media power are cumulative, working through the repetition of particular ways of
handling causality and agency, particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth.”. Finally,
4
through corpus linguistics, the researchers can also find choices which are used less frequently, and
which otherwise might have been overlooked (ibid.)
Corpus linguistics has been used for various purposes, from dictionary creation, forensics, to
language variation and language teaching (Baker, 2006: 2‒3). One of the areas where corpus
linguistics methods can be applied is also discourse analysis. Although the term discourse is a bit
“problematic” as it has been used in many different ways over the years (ibid.), one of its definitions
by Foucault (1972: 49 as quoted in ibid.: 4) describes it as “practices which systematically form
the objects of which they speak”. Moreover, it can contain “a set of meaning, metaphors,
representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a
particular version of event…” (Burr, 1995: 48 as quoted in ibid.).
There can be corpora of various kinds and it is important to note that “it is not the case that a corpus
consists of any collection of texts, picked at random.” (Baker, 2006: 26). The type of corpora
depends on what the researcher is interested in examining. There can be specialized and more
general corpora. For example, if the researcher is interested in the language used in news like in
the case of this thesis, then then the corpus is a specialized one it should contain texts from news
sources.
However, if somebody is interested in the language in general, regardless of genre, then a more
“well-balanced” general corpus, that is a corpus which can give a better picture of the language as
a whole would be needed. One of the first attempts of such a “well-balanced” corpus is the Brown
Corpus (see Figure 1) (Lindquist and Levin 2018: 3). What makes general corpora be regarded as
balanced is the fact that they consist of a wide range of texts and of various genres as can been
observed by the contents of Brown Corpus for example. Another example of a “well-balanced”
corpus, or else called a “reference corpus” is the BNC (British National Corpus) which besides
containing a wide range of texts, also contains both written and spoken data (Baker 2006: 30).
5
Figure 1 Contents of Brown Corpus taken from Lindquist and Levin (2018).
2.1.2. Critical discourse analysis
According to Dijk (2005: 352), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is “a type of discourse analytical
research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted,
reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context”. That means that the
language needs to be analyzed in consideration of the social context (Baker, Gabrielatos, and
McEnery 2013: 3) and therefore its purpose is to explain how power relations are expressed through
language as well as to explain the observed patterns of speech in accordance with the sociopolitical
environment they are found at.
Furthermore, “for CDA, language is not powerful on its own – it gains power by the use people
make of it” (Weiss and Wodak 2007: 14). Therefore, it depends on the researcher to interpret the
results which as will be discussed in section 2.1.3. can be a cause of criticism for bias. The methods
6
for contacting a CDA analysis vary and depend on the researcher and the aims of their research
(Baker et al. 2008: 273).
The field of CDA can be considered a multidisciplinary one and its main tenets are summarized as
follows (Wodak and Fairclough, 2005: 353):
1. CDA addresses social problems.
2. Power relations are discursive.
3. Discourse constitutes society and culture.
4. Discourse does ideological work.
5. Discourse is historical.
6. The link between text and society is mediated.
7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory.
8. Discourse is a form of social action.
Therefore, in CDA studies, the analysis of the discourses present in a text or texts cannot be
explained based only on the text itself, but the answers as to why these discourses exist, need to be
searched also outside the text. For example, when examining the discourses regarding RASIM in
a newspaper, taking into consideration the ideological stance of the paper (liberal, conservative)
can help the researcher explain why particular discourses are present or absent there.
In order to discover those discourses though, the researcher of a CDA study should consider what
kind of linguistic items he/she needs to look for and analyze. In order to do that he/she should have
the following questions in mind (Wodak 2001: 72):
How are persons named and referred to linguistically?
What traits, characteristics, qualities, and features are attributed to them?
By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social
groups try to justify and legitimize the exclusion, discrimination, suppression, and
exploitation of others?
From what perspective or point of view are these labels, attributions and arguments
expressed?
Are the respective utterances articulated overtly? Are they intensified or are they mitigated?
7
2.1.3. Combining corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis: A corpus-assisted
critical discourse analysis
Earlier studies of CDA have been criticized for researcher’s bias as sometimes the researcher could
choose to analyze the kind of texts that support his/her claims, but they may not have been
representative of the general attitudes regarding an X topic. Another reason for the criticism of the
CDA is that it is a small-scale research which may be overlooking language patterns and schemes
occurring in millions of texts (Aluthman 2018). For these reasons, in the past few years, many
researchers have decided to combine elements of Corpus Linguistics (CL) into their CDA as well
as CAD (Computer-Assisted Discourse) resulting in the Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse
Analysis (CACDA). In this way, the research is based on a large-scale base, eliminating a lot of
the researcher's bias. Furthermore, the data belong to authentic texts and in addition, CACDA
“relies on triangulation using the qualitative tools of CDA and the quantitative tools of CL.” (ibid.,
22).
However, even with the triangulation of the research methods, the results should be taken with a
grain of salt since according to Sinclair (2003: 117) and Partington (2004: 131) as mentioned in
Polymeneas (2010: 245), when trying to attribute the discourse prosody3, it is the researcher
himself/herself, who chooses to attribute that meaning according to his/her stance. For example,
often the lemma immigrant collocates with wave. According to Baker (2006: 81) wave as well as
other water metaphors have a negative connotation because they refer to the movements of
immigrants as something inanimate or something uncontrollable (e.g., flood). However, for
someone else, the word wave may have different connotations in their opinion. Therefore,
objectivity is more or less impossible, and the “discourse is going to be based upon the discourses
that we already (often unconsciously) live with” (ibid., 4).
3
Discourse prosody: “A term reported by Tognini-Bonelli (1996) and Stubbs (2001) relating to the way that words in
a corpus can collocate with a related set of words or phrases, often revealing (hidden) attitudes” (Baker, Hardie, and
McEnery 2006: 58). [Note from the author of the thesis: In this quote, the date for Tognini-Bonelli seems to be
mistaken by the authors since in their reference list there is no work by Tognini-Bonelli in 1996 but there is in 2001.]
8
2.2. Corpus Methodology
There are various methods used in corpus linguistics. Some of the methods used in corpus studies
include frequency lists, concordances, collocations, and keywords. The current paper will make
use of the methodology regarding collocations and concordances as described in Baker (2006: 92–
93, 119–120). Additionally, since this study will be comparing collocates of different sized corpora
the notion of normalized frequency as well as that of statistical significance will be explored and
explained in this section.
2.2.1. Collocation analysis
Collocation is according to Baker, Hardie, and McEnery (2006: 36) “the phenomenon surrounding
the fact that certain words are more likely to occur in combination with other words in certain
contexts.” This suggests that there are associations between words and one can better understand
the meanings of words through their collocations (Baker, 2006: 96).
In corpus linguistics, a researcher can get the most frequent collocates of a lemma from corpora.
Most corpus analyzing tools, give the user the option to produce collocates of a lemma or a word.
The simplest way a tool creates a list of collocates is by counting the number of times a word
appears within a predefined window to the left and/or to the right of the word in question (Baker,
2006: 100). However, this type of collocates which are based on frequency only tend to favor high-
frequency function words such as the, which do not usually reveal any type of exclusive relation
between words (Baker, Hardie, and McEnery 2006: 37). In order to avoid this type of high-
frequency words, many corpus-analyzing tools have statistical tools which take into account the
frequency and the exclusivity of the relationship between words (ibid). For example, Sketch
Engine, allows the user to use T-score, Log-likelihood test, MI-score, MI-score3, and Log-Dice
among others (‘Statistics Used in Sketch Engine | Sketch Engine’ 2015). Each test has different
functions and usability which is useful to know to properly use them. For example, according to
Goutsos and Fragaki (2015: 84), the MI-score “(translated from Greek) results from the comparison
of the real co-occurrence of two words with their expected co-occurrence if they appeared in
random order. It is a measure of mutual attraction between words and their connection but not of
the certainty of the connection. It emphasizes on words of low frequency”.
9
However, some tools do not give many options to the user. For example, the NOW corpus only
gives the option of MI and/or frequency only. Therefore, the researchers need to use whatever is
available to them while bearing in mind the possible shortcomings when interpreting their results.
Figure 2 shows the ten most frequent collocates of the lemma immigrant (window of 5 words to
the left and write of the KWIC) in the pre-referendum period, based on frequency and MI-score in
the NOW Corpus.
Such a collocational list, therefore, could provide the researcher with some initial insights on the
discourses or patterns surrounding a topic. For example, by examining the most frequent collocates
of the lemma immigrant, the researcher can understand that some of the discourses regarding
immigrants are concerned with the topic of Legality (illegal, undocumented, suspected, smuggled).
Of course, in some cases, the collocates might not reveal a specific topic or discourse, in which
cases, the researcher is obliged to examine the collocate in context by looking at its concordances.
For instance, Baker (2006: 104, 107), while examining the most frequent collocates of the word
bachelor(s) (in the sense of unmarried man), finds that life is one of its collocates. Life on its own
does not provide the researcher with a specific insight as to what kind the bachelor life is. It is
through examining the instances of the collocate in context, where a clearer picture of the
discourses regarding bachelor life can be seen.
Figure 2 Top ten collocates of the lemma immigrant based on Frequency and MI-score (pre-referendum period).
10
2.2.2. Concordance analysis
Concordance is “is a list of all of the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented
within the context in which they occur – usually a few words to the left and right of the search
term.”(Baker, Hardie, and McEnery, 2006: 42–43). Usually, most corpus analyzing tools allow the
user to sort the concordances alphabetically based on the search word itself or based on the words
left and right of the search word. This allows the user to better discern possible linguistic patterns
(ibid.). Figure 3 shows an example of a concordance list where the Keyword in Context (KWIC)
is the lemma immigrant and is sorted 2 places to the left and one place to the right of the node. The
different colors demonstrate different parts of speech (Davies 2013). In this sorted example of the
concordances, for instance, it is easy to see that in the first 5 lines there are quantification patterns
regarding immigrants, which would not be as easily discerned if the lines were unsorted.
Moreover, as mentioned in the previous section, concordances allow the researcher to see how a
collocate is used in context. So, for example, as will be discussed in the results section, said is one
of the most frequent collocates of all four lemmas, but it is only when expanding the concordance
lines of the collocate that the researcher can examine how it is used (in this case to quote the
opinion/views of people in official positions in the majority of the cases).
The purpose, therefore, of a concordance analysis “is to look for patterns of language use, based
on repetitions. Identifying such patterns may help us to note discourses, particularly if the patterns
are relatively common.” (Baker 2006: 77).
Figure 3 Concordance results of the lemma immigrant (sorting 2 places to the left and 1 to the right of the KWIC).
11
2.2.3. Frequency and statistical tests
As above-mentioned, through the use of corpus linguistics, the researcher can get an insight in the
main discourses that may exist regarding a topic in a certain corpus (e.g., news corpus) through the
use of frequency lists of collocates. Different statistical tests can produce different collocational
lists. Statistical tests are also useful regarding the comparison of lemmas or words in two or more
corpora of different sizes. In that case, normalized frequencies of the collocates should be used.
The level of normalization usually depends on the size of the corpora to be compared and especially
on the size of the smaller corpus. For example, if one is comparing two corpora, one of 30 million
words and one of 1 million words, then it would be best to normalize the frequency per million. If
the corpora though are of a few thousand words, then one could normalize per 10,000 or 100,000
words (Lindquist and Levin 2018: 42).
However, even when the frequencies are normalized, the statistical significance between two
variables is important in order to understand whether those variables are independent or whether
they are related (‘UCREL Significance Test System’ 2021). Few of the above-mentioned tests are
commonly used to test that. For the current research, the UCREL Significance Test System by
Lancaster University is used. This system is an online tool where the user can test the statistical
significance between 2 or more variables (ibid.) In particular, the tool, uses chi-squared, log-
likelihood, and the Fisher exact test (ibid.). Log-likelihood and chi-square produce values that can
be converted into p-values, while the Fisher test directly gives the p-value (ibid). As described on
the website (ibid.):
The p-value is the probability of getting the observed values in the contingency table if the
two variables are independent. Like all probability scores, it is between zero (no chance at
all of getting these observed values) and one (absolute certainty of getting these observed
values). If the p-value is sufficiently low, it is very unlikely that we would see the observed
data unless the variables were related; therefore, we conclude that the variables are related.
12
Usually, the cut-off point is at 5% which translates to a p-value < 0.05. However, there are other
levels4 of significance too. In particular, the levels of significance as described in the tool are the
following (‘UCREL Significance Test System’ 2021):
p < 0.05 — the results are significant at the 5% level

p < 0.01 — the results are significant at the 1% level
p < 0.001 — the results are significant at the 0.1% level
p < 0.0001 — the results are significant at the 0.01% level
2.3. News media and RASIM
2.3.1. Definitions of RASIM
In order to better understand the discourses regarding immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, and
refugees (in short RASIM), the definitions of their terms from different sources need to be
explored. In particular, their definitions will be searched in the Oxford English Dictionary (online)
and the Refugee Council (See Table 1).
Table 1 Definitions of RASIM
Definitions of RASIM
Oxford English Dictionary Refugee Council
Refugee A person who has been forced to leave “A person who owing to a well-founded
his or her home and seek refuge fear of being persecuted for reasons of
elsewhere, esp. in a foreign country, race, religion, nationality, membership
from war, religious persecution, of a particular social group or political
political troubles, the effects of a opinion, is outside the country of his
natural disaster, etc.; a displaced nationality and is unable or, owing to
person. Also figurative and in extended such fear, is unwilling to avail himself
use (‘Refugee, n.’ 2021). of the protection of that country; or
4
Other levels of significance, which are generally recognized, are: p ≥ 0.05 not significant, p < 0.05 significant,
p < 0.01 very significant, p < 0.001 highly significant (Stefanowitsch 2020: 174).
13
who, not having a nationality and being
outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such
events, is unable or, owing to such fear,
is unwilling to return to it.” (Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees,
1951:152 as quoted in ‘The Truth about
Asylum’ n.d.).
Asylum A person seeking refuge, esp. political A person who has left their country of
Seeker asylum, in a nation other than his or her origin and formally applied for asylum
own (‘Asylum, n.’ 2021). in another country but whose
application has not yet been concluded.
Wherever possible, we prefer to
describe someone as a person seeking
asylum as we feel that the term asylum
seeker is dehumanising (‘The Truth
about Asylum’ n.d.).
Immigrant One who or that which immigrates; a —
person who migrates into a country as
a settler (‘Immigrant, n.’ 2021).
Migrant A person who moves temporarily or Someone who has moved to another
seasonally from place to place; country for other reasons, such as to
A person who moves permanently to find work (‘The Truth about Asylum’
live in a new country, town, etc., esp. to n.d.).
look for work, or to take up a post, etc.;
an immigrant. (‘Migrant, n.’ 2021)
As it can be observed from the above table, the definitions of RASIM may slightly vary depending
on who is defining them (except for immigrant, which is not defined by the Refugee Council).
Regarding the term refugee, both sources describe as refugee someone who has left their country
due to political or religious reasons. However, the Oxford Definition also mentions natural disasters
14
as one of the reasons refugees might leave their country. In addition, the definition of the
Convention mentions that is the “fear of persecution” which makes those people leave their home
country, which might suggest that those people might not have experienced any type of persecution
yet. On the other hand, in the Oxford definition, they are “forced” by the circumstances, which
could suggest that they have already experienced those circumstances.
Regarding asylum seeker, the Oxford definition underlines the reason for political asylum, while
the one by the Refugee Council does not mention the reason for asylum but underlines that their
application status is not yet complete, thus highlight the procedure of getting asylum. What is
interesting is that in the definition by the Refugee Council, they also mention that they think this
term is dehumanizing and opt for the phrase “person seeking asylum” when possible, therefore
taking a stance towards the discourses regarding asylum seekers.
As far as migrant is concerned, both definitions mention work, as one of the reasons for moving
but the definition by Oxford underlines the temporary or permanent nature of moving and gives
the term immigrant as an alternative, which suggests the synonymity of these terms.
Consequently, there is some overlapping in the meaning of some of these terms as is in the case
for the pairs refugee-asylum seeker (both are seeking to escape a difficult situation) and immigrant-
migrant (both move in another country without the suggestion of an emergency reason as for
refugees/asylum seekers). Nevertheless, a distinction between refugee-asylum seeker and
immigrant-migrant, in the sense that the first pair is “forced” to ask for asylum/refuge in another
country while the second pair is choosing to move to another country.
While examining the data of the current thesis, it is important to keep those definitions in mind, to
see whether the discourses regarding RASIM correspond to the definitions by the Oxford
Dictionary definitions or the ones by the Refugee Council or whether they are completely different.
2.3.2. News press and the shaping of opinions
Researching the discourses produced by media outlets is of great importance as the influence of
media is deemed to be very important. As Fairclough observes (1989: 54, as quoted in Baker 2006:
72).
15
The hidden power of media discourse and the capacity of… powerholders to exercise this
power depend on systematic tendencies in news reporting and other media activities. A
single text on its own is quite insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative,
working through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency,
particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth.
Therefore, one may assume that journalists have the “power” to shape opinions “through the use
of stereotypes, values, beliefs, and prejudices that the editor retains will reflect the views and taste
of her audience” (cf. Filmer 2014, in Filmer 2018: 169). What is more, journalists can also shape
opinions by often quoting the opinion of people who are in a powerful or privileged position since
their opinion is considered “accepted” because they are believed to express opinions that are based
on more accurate information (Baker 2006: 72).
Previous academic research has proven that the press has managed to influence among others
election results, opinions on asylum seekers, and even people’s constructions about sex differences
(Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 5–6). Nonetheless, the relationship between readers and
newspapers is rather complex, with one influencing the other (ibid. 6).
However, the readers are not passive audiences. The media might “influence us in the way we think
about a particular topic, but they do not tell us what to think” (Filmer 2018: 169–170). The meaning
is eventually created by the interaction of the texts produced by the newspapers and their readers
(Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 6). Therefore, the readers should be considered active
since “the reader is no longer reading an article in protracted isolation; s/he can comment on it via
a website, email it to a friend, post it on a social network for others to discuss it” (O’Keeffe 2011:
450, as quoted in McGlashan and Baker 2017: 2). Moreover, the readers’ opinion can also affect
the sales of a newspaper. For example, if a paper’s opinion significantly disagrees with the opinion
of the intended readership, it might lose many of its readers as shown in the example of the Daily
Mirror’s anti-war stance on Iraq in 2003 (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 6). During that
year, the newspaper’s circulation dropped below 2 million, which had not happened in seven years
(ibid.).
Therefore, the newspapers, even though, they significantly influence people’s opinion, and thus
constructing the identity of their readership they ought to do that in relationship with their readers
if they wish to be successful (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 6).
16
Furthermore, the UK press and subsequently the discourses constructed and reproduced through it,
are not limited to the national borders of the UK but they can also cross borders. With the
digitalization of the media, nowadays, anyone can read almost anything anywhere in the world. In
addition, there has been a widespread belief that the UK press is “the guardian of truth and beacon
of objectivity, even in academic literature” (Filmer 2018: 171). However, this idea of the
objectivity of the British press has been idealized rather than demonstrated (Hampton 2008: 477).
Nonetheless, this belief along with the digitalization of the news could potentially affect and shape
opinions in many countries all over the world.
2.3.3. The portrayal of RASIM in the media
In the past decades, many countries have seen a big influx of refugees and immigrants as a result
of either economic problems in the home country of the immigrants and refugees or as a result of
the war in Syria. As political philosopher, Thomas Nail states “[the] twenty-first century will be
the century of the migrant” (Nail 2015: 1, as quoted in Filmer 2018: 165). Just in 2015 over one
million human beings, from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, endangered their own lives in badly
constructed boats and vessels to reach the shores of Europe (ibid.). One of those countries was the
United Kingdom, which was a part of the European Union until they held a referendum in 2016
regarding their EU membership, in which referendum the majority of the UK population decided
to leave the EU.
The topic of immigration has been heavily discussed in the UK press for many years now and it is
no secret that often the depiction of refugees and immigrants has been a negative one. Many earlier
studies, such as Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery (2013), KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak
(2012), and Filmer (2018) have studied the language used in the UK press with regards to RASIM.
The results of those studies seem to conclude that there are a lot of negative discourses towards
RASIM, especially among the right-wing broadsheet papers and tabloids, such as the Sun and the
Daily Mail. Furthermore, what is interesting is that the terms refugee, asylum seeker, immigrant,
migrant have often been used as synonyms (Filmer 2018: 167) although their dictionary definitions
often suggest otherwise as it has been already discussed. Some categories of reference used in the
description of RASIM are according to Baker et al. (2008: 286) “(a) Provenance/transit/destination,
(b) Number, (c) Entry, (d) Economic problems,(e) Residence, (f) Return/repatriation, (g) Legality
17
and (h) Plight. These categories are regularly used in ways which negatively reference RASIM,
particularly those concerned with Entry, Economic problems, and Legality”.
In particular, by analyzing the patterns of speech regarding refugees, Baker (2006: 81) suggests
that they are often represented as a “natural disaster”, an “elemental force which is difficult to
predict” or as “packages”. Those representations are constructed by quantifying them, e.g., “four
million refugees” (ibid. 79), by using water metaphors e.g., “overflowing refugee camps” (ibid. 81)
and package metaphors e.g., “[] …refugees are delivered… []” (ibid.), which could be considered
as an effort to dehumanize them (ibid.).
However, as KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak (2012) suggest, there is a differentiation

between newspapers (left-wing vs. right-wing) and especially between the genre of newspapers
(tabloid vs. broadsheet) in the strategies they use to construct the image of RASIM, with the quality
right-wing newspapers being more “productive” in the way they negatively represent RASIM and
with the tabloids being “reproductive of the existing layman’s stereotypes and labels and taps into
oversimplification of actually very complex phenomena.” (ibid., 296).
2.3.4. RASIM in numbers
As above-mentioned, the topic of RASIM discourses has often been studied and described in a
number of corpus-based studies (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013; Gabrielatos and Baker
2008; KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak 2012). One of the most frequent elements of the
RASIM discourses is their quantification (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 22). Examining some of
the statistics on the numbers of RASIM in the UK could provide the researcher with a better insight
when interpreting the results of this study, especially regarding the quantification discourses.
According to a briefing from the Migration Observatory (Sumption and Vargas-Silva 2020: 5), the
net migration 5to the UK has had some fluctuations over the years but it showed an upwards trend
especially after 2004 when the EU was enlarged. In particular, it was only during the economic
crisis of 2008, that UK saw a small decrease in net migration and then again in 2010–2012 (see
Figure 4) when the conservative party had as one of its goals to reduce net migration (ibid.). During
that time period, the migration had reached pre-2004 levels but eventually, it rose again, peaking
5
Net migration is “This briefing provides an overview of net migration to the UK – defined as the difference
between immigration and emigration of people moving for at least a year” (Sumption and Vargas-Silva 2020: 2).
18
to 330,000 in 2015. After that, and especially after the result of the Brexit referendum, the net
migration fell sharply, with a slight increase in 2019 (ibid.)
Figure 4 Net Migration in the UK during 1991–2019 (Non-EU, EU, UK) (Sumption and Vargas-Silva 2020: 5)
In terms of refugees, UK was presenting an increasing trend in its number of accepted refugees at
the beginning of the 2000s (see Figure 5). However, since 2006, a sharp decrease is observed (‘U.K.
Refugee Statistics 1960–2021’ n.d.). That slightly changed with a small increase of 4.97% during
the refugee crisis in 2015, while in 2016 a 3.31% decrease is again observed. After that, there is an
observed slight increase in 2017–2019 with another decrease observed in 2020 (ibid.).
19
Figure 5 Refugees granted asylum in the UK 2000–2020.6
In terms of asylum seekers, UK saw an upwards trend in accepted applications from 2010 until
2015 after which there was a slight decrease for a couple of years and then an increase. In fact, in
2019, the number of accepted applications was the highest one in the decade (see Figure 6) (‘How
Many People Do We Grant Asylum or Protection To?’ 2020).
6
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/refugee-statistics
20
Figure 6 Asylum application lodged in the UK during 2010–2019.7 (‘How Many People Do We Grant Asylum or Protection To?’
2020).
2.4. Brexit
2.4.1. Brexit and immigration
As Aluthman (2018: 20) mentions “the term Brexit—a blended word of Britain and exit—came
into existence to refer to the UK's official withdrawal from the EU.” It was in 2016 when the then
Prime Minister, David Cameron, under the pressure of the Parliament and the Independence Party,
had to announce the referendum regarding the EU membership of the UK (ibid.). The referendum,
which was held on the 23rd of June 2016, ended with the Leave Campaign winning with 51.9%
over the Remain campaign.
7
Source: Asylum applications, initial decisions and resettlement – Asy_D01 and Asy_D02
21
One of the main reasons behind the Brexit referendum, which likely heavily influenced the
outcome was the issue of immigration. In particular, those in favor of Brexit hoped to regain control
of their borders by leaving the EU, and thus no longer having to mandatorily accept all the
immigrants coming from other EU countries (Vote Leave Campaign, 2016).
In recent research, Aluthman (2018) studied the language related to immigration used in the Brexit
referendum debate, discerning between the pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit campaigns. In this study, the
researcher, following the methodological approach of Baker (2006), combines CDA and CL
approaches by gathering a corpus of 108,452,923 words, compiled by tweets, blogs, and daily news
regarding Brexit.
The researcher used keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis to determine firstly, the
overall “theme” of the corpora and secondly, the specific language related to immigrants and
refugees. As his analysis reveals, one of the main “themes” of the corpus is the topic of
immigration. Moreover, further analysis of the sub-corpora, (anti-Brexit and pro-Brexit corpora),
reveal many negative images towards immigrants in the pro-Brexit corpus. For example, in the
pro-Brexit corpus, there seems to be concern about the quality of life of the British people as a
result of the increased immigration (Aluthman 2018: 25). On the other hand, in the anti-Brexit
corpus, there are more positive images of the immigrants, underlying the positive contributions of
the immigrants in the UK economy as well as the cultural diversity of the communities and what
is more, it seems that there are concerns over the difficulties and poor conditions these immigrants
have to face (ibid. 26–27).
2.4.2. Brexit aftermath and relation with the current thesis
The debate over Brexit was highly covered by the UK press and news sources with many papers
showing publicly their support over the Remain or Leave campaigns. Some of the papers
supporting the Leave Campaign were the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph among
others. On the other hand, some of the papers supporting the Remain campaign were the Times, the
Guardian, and the Daily Mirror to name a few (Ridley 2016).
22
As above-mentioned, earlier research has supported that the press is still influencing the attitudes
and opinions of the public towards topics and current issues in one’s society (McGlashan and Baker
2017; D. Filmer 2018). Therefore, examining the discourses in the UK's new sources regarding
RASIM before the Brexit referendum could reveal some interesting results in relation to the
outcome of the referendum.
Furthermore, much of the research in the past has focused on the image of RASIM in the UK press
over the first decade of the 2000s and the 2010s. However, there has not been yet enough research
on the relation between the press language regarding RASIM and Brexit as Aluthman suggests
(2018: 32).
However, since the Brexit referendum took place, Brexit remained (and possibly will remain for a
while) a current affair because it was an unprecedented affair which caused political turbulences
within the UK and additionally because of the process of negations regarding the exit of the UK
from the EU was long. Around three years after the referendum, and after many extensions UK has
officially exited the EU (Mueller 2019). Consequently, it could be very interesting to approach the
discourses for RASIM within the Brexit context and examine whether and how this unprecedented
affair affected those discourses.
23
3. Methodology
3.1. Aims and research questions.
As mentioned in the Introduction of this paper, the general aim of this thesis is to discover the
discourse patterns related to immigrants, refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers before the Brexit
referendum and compare them with ones found after the referendum. In particular, the time periods
are divided as follows:
i i) Pre-referendum period is from 1 January 2013 until the day of the referendum, that is the
23rd of June 2016.
ii ii) After-referendum period is from 24th of June 2016 until 31 December 2019.
The reason those specific dates were decided was because they are roughly two and a half years
each from the referendum date, so they are quite equal time periods.
In order to study this topic, the following research questions need to be answered:
1. What kind of linguistic constructions are used in the discourses regarding refugees, asylum
seekers, immigrants, and migrants?
2. Do the lemmas present semantic differences in their discourses or are the terms used
interchangeably?
3. Are there any quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the lemmas before and after
the referendum?
The first question could help identify the type of discourses surrounding RASIM, while the second
one will provide further insight on the reasons why some of these discourses exist. In particular, if
the terms are used interchangeably then, it could explain why the theme of Legality for instance
might also appear in the discourses regarding refugees. Finally, the third question will help answer
if the Brexit referendum affected the discourses by examining whether and how the discourses
about RASIM have changed.
24
3.2. Material
3.2.1. The NOW Corpus
For the current research, the NOW Corpus8 (News on the Web) from the English Corpora (english-
corpora.org) was used. This corpus contains about “13 billion words of data from web-based
newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present time” (Davies 2013). As above-mentioned,
the corpus for this particular corpus is interested in the pre-referendum and post-referendum
periods, and therefore the corpus created was between 2013 and 2019 (1 January 2013–23 June
2016 and 24 June 2016–31 December 2019).
Furthermore, regarding the newspapers that were chosen for this corpus, all the available types of
newspapers and news sources of the tool were chosen, that is conservative, liberal, broadsheets,
tabloids, blogs, or university news to name a few. This way the corpus could be representative of
most ideological and political opinions in the UK while consisting of different news genres. Some
of the papers which were used and were available on the NOW Corpus database are The Sun, Daily
Mail, Evening Standard, The Telegraph, Financial Times, and The Guardian to name a few. The
total corpus (combining the two sub-corpora) was 1,000,954 words.
Moreover, it is important to note that even though the articles chosen are from British sources,
some of the discourses refer to RASIM in other countries, such as the US or South Africa, and
Mexico to name a few. Nonetheless, it was decided to keep those discourses too when analyzing
the data since the main aim of this study is to examine how RASIM is portrayed in the British news
sources whether they refer to the RASIM groups which live in the UK or those which live
elsewhere.
Choosing this tool has proven rather helpful due to the advantages it offers to the user but at the
same time, it has created a few problems in the analysis of the corpus due to the technical drawbacks
its use entails, which create a few delimitations in this research.
8
The NOW Corpus can be found at: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/
25
3.2.1.1. Advantages of the NOW Corpus
One of the main reasons this tool was preferred for this thesis is that it is time-saving. The texts are
already stored and annotated among other things with regards to the date of publishing and the
news source they belong to. Therefore, there was no need to spend hours annotating each file and
the only thing needed was to set the criteria, that is set Great Britain as the country of the sources,
choose the time period (2013–2016 and 2016–2019), and the keywords within the text or in the
article title, based on which the corpus would be built upon. In particular, the keywords for this
research were the following: “immigrant*9”, “refugee*”, “migrant*”, and “asylum seeker*. What
is more, there is more objectivity to the corpus building process through the use of NOW since the
texts are not chosen by the researcher.
Another reason this tool proved to be useful for this thesis is that it is not just a corpus building
tool, but it actually allows the user to proceed with the analysis of the corpora and look for
collocates, concordances, compare words within the same corpus, and check the frequency of
words or lemmas, among others.
In addition, since the corpus turned out to be over 1 million words, it allowed for some quantitative
analysis, which with a smaller corpus it might not have been possible to do so. Moreover, this tool
is offered for free (up to a limit) and the only thing the user has to do is to sign-up and create an
account since, without registration, the user is allowed to do only 10 to 15 queries (Davies 2013).
3.2.1.2. Disadvantages of the NOW Corpus
Even though this tool proved to be very useful in some respects, it also proved very inconvenient
in some others. First and foremost, the tool does not allow the user to use more than a keyword at
a time (see Figure 7) when creating the corpus and therefore the process had to be repeated for each
keyword and for each time period. In addition, if the researcher chooses to build their corpus
through the use of keywords within the text, they might end up with a lot of “irrelevant” articles,
that is articles that the keyword only appears once or is not even part of the main text (it could be
part of the title of another article featured in the newspaper website and copied by “accident”). In
9
The asterisk allows the database to look for all those words that start with “immigrant”, that is “immigrant,
immigrants” which is very useful since the user does not have to make a new search for each term.
26
order to limit the possibilities of “irrelevant” articles, the desired keywords were searched on the
“Article Title” since if those terms are featured in the title, then it is likely that the article will
revolve around them.
Another problem the user has to face is when trying to select the newspapers, that is it allows the
user to select only one paper at a time. However, leaving the newspaper section empty and selecting
Great Britain as the location was proven to be more helpful since the corpus then would include
articles from all the newspapers published in the UK and that were available in their database and
the user could just unselect the ones, he/she does not need (see Figure 8).
Moreover, there were other technical problems when selecting the time periods. For example, when
setting the post-referendum time period (24 June 2016–31 December 2019), sometimes, the tool
would select articles from 2016 and 2017 but not from 2018 or 2019 for certain keywords. For this
reason, after some trial and error, smaller time frames were chosen and later combined, in order to
build the corpus little by little (60 articles per year, per keyword).
Figure 7 The "Create Corpus" tab of the NOW Corpus.
27
Figure 8 The selection of the corpus texts in the NOW Corpus.
Furthermore, even though the tool claims that the user can move some texts from one corpus to
another, in practice, if the combined corpus is large, that is if the combined files exceeded 1,000
files, usually the texts would not be transferred. This made the creation of larger corpora
problematic, and it resulted in the creation of two (relatively) small corpora so that they could be
easily handled (pre-referendum corpus, post-referendum corpus, about half a million words each).
What is more, when examining some of the collocates, more technical problems were noticed. For
example, some collocates presented high frequency but when expanding their concordance lines,
not all of their instances were visible. This is because those instances are likely to be “duplicate”
according to the information provided by the tool (see Figure 9) (Davies 2013). Therefore, the high
frequency of some collocates is due to “copying” errors such as the captioning of the same gallery
of images featured in several articles or the headlines of other articles inside of the article and as a
consequence, the interpretation of those results can become problematic.
28
Figure 9 Information on omitted concordances (NOW Corpus).
Finally, the tool does not allow the user to download the corpus for offline use or to use in another
corpus-analyzing tool unless the user pays for the whole NOW Corpus, which is quite expensive,
starting from 375$ (academic license for one corpus) to 795$ (non-academic license for one corpus)
and therefore, the user needs to rely only on the analyzing tools offered by the NOW Corpus
(Davies, 2013).
3.3. Methodology
The methodology used in the analysis of the corpora is based on the one described by Baker (2006:
92–93, 119–120) regarding the analysis with the use of collocations and concordances. The main
steps which are described below were followed in the creation and analysis of the sub-corpora,
although not all steps were applicable, and additionally, due to the volume of the corpora, some
steps were omitted (e.g., step 8 of collocational analysis).
3.3.1. Analysis of the corpus through the use of collocations
According to Baker (2006: 95–96) “when a word regularly appears near another word, and the
relationship is statistically significant in some way, then such co-occurrences are referred to as
collocates and the phenomena of certain words frequently occurring next to or near each other is
collocation”. Therefore, through collocation, it is possible to understand better the “meanings and
associations between words which are otherwise difficult to ascertain from a small-scale analysis
of a single text” (ibid.).
29
In order to analyze a corpus through the use of collocations Baker (2006:119–120) summarizes the
steps the researcher should follow to conduct the analysis. In particular, there are 10 steps:
1. Create a corpus from scratch or obtain access to already-made corpora. (Obtain access to NOW
Corpus and create two sub-corpora based on the pre-referendum and post-referendum period
already described. The lemmas used for the creation of both sub-corpora were refugee, asylum
seeker, immigrant, and migrant and all the news sources were from the UK).
2. Decide what are going to be the search terms, which in the case of the current thesis are the
lemmas refugee, asylum seeker, immigrant, and migrant, while including the term’s possible
derivatives or their possible substitution in the text through anaphora or proper nouns.
3. Create the collocational lists based on the available algorithms. (Based on frequency and MI-
score and in the case of the asylum seeker, based on frequency only).
4. Decide which collocates are worth looking at, according to their statistical significance while
removing the irrelevant collocates such as grammatical words. (Ten most frequent lexical
collocates based on frequency and MI).
5. Try to group the collocates according to the semantic, thematic, or grammatic category they
belong to. (Categories of reference such as Number, Entry, Residence to name a few).
6. Look into the concordances of the collocates and locate any possible patterns of speech by
examining the surrounding context. In this way, it is possible to find the discourses which are
prevalent in the particular subject. (For example, the collocate life, does not provide much
information for the discourses of the lemma immigrant. It is through the examination of the
concordances, that as will be seen in the next chapter, that life refers to the contribution immigrants
have in US life for instance).
7. Contest possibly those concordances whose discourses are questioning or contradicting the
dominant ones (For example, children is one of the most frequent collocates of the immigrant. One
of its discourses refers to the policies of the UK government, to not allow immigrant children to
state education and thus appears to be negative. However, by further examining the expanded
context of that collocate, it can be seen that this policy is sometimes criticized).
30
8. Look into those concordances lines which do not have any collocates and try to find what kind
of discourse prosodies exist and whether they are contradicting with those of the collocational
analysis.
9. What are the relations between the collocates? (For instance, one of the collocates of the refugee
is the word status. In order to understand what kind of connotations the collocate has, the word was
searched in iWeb).
10. Try to explain why some particular discourse patterns exist around some collocates and how
they are related to the production of the text and its possible reception by its readers. (For example,
the theme of Number is prevalent in the discourses regarding refugees, due to the refugee crisis of
2015).
3.3.2. Analysis of the corpus-based on concordance analysis.
Baker (2006: 71) defines concordance as “a list of all the occurrences of a particular search term
in a corpus, presented within the context that they occur in; usually a few words to the left and right
of the search term”. He also describes the 10-step guide in order to analyze the corpus through
concordance (ibid., 92–93). The steps are as follows:
Steps 1 and 2 are the same as the ones mentioned in the collocational analysis.
3. Get the concordances of the keyword in question(s). (In the case of this study: refugee, asylum
seeker, immigrant, migrant).
4. Remove those lines which are irrelevant (space aliens vs aliens as a term used for refugees) or
those which are repetitions.
5. Sort the concordances (alphabetically) according to their surrounding context and try to examine
what kind of patterns are present (grammatical, semantic, or discourse, e.g., discourses of Legality,
Number).
6. Search the corpus for more of those patterns.
7. Examine more closely the existence of certain terms by comparing them for example to a general
corpus or by looking into their collocates and or distribution.
31
8. If there are no other patterns that can be discerned, examine closely the rest of the concordance
lines in order to find possibly similar discourse or semantic patterns.
9. Via your personal intuition locate any rare or non-existent discourses and check whether they
appear in more general corpora.
10. Try to draw hypotheses as to why those patterns exist and relate them to the issues regarding
text production and reception.
In this analysis, since the corpus is rather large, a combination of the two analyses will take place
by first focusing on the results of the collocational analysis, looking into semantic and thematic
patterns around the discourses regarding RASIM. Regarding the collocational analysis, lists of
collocates based on their frequency with minimum MI-score 3 (recommended by the tool) will be
created. However, since the tool does not offer any other statistical tools for sorting, lists of lexical
collocates 10without taking into account the MI will also be made in order to examine if any other
patterns might have been missed since the MI tends to favor low-frequency words (Baker 2006:
102). In the case of asylum seeker, lexical collocates based on the frequency only will be examined
due to technical errors11 of the NOW corpus. In addition, regarding the span for the collocates, a
range with 5 words to the left and 5 words to the right of the Keyword in Context (KWIC) was
chosen.
After the collocational analysis, a sample of concordance lines for each lemma will be examined
to discover whether there are any other patterns of speech which were missed during the
collocational analysis.
For the comparison of collocates between corpora of different sizes, as mentioned in chapter 2, the
log-likelihood test from the UCREL Significance Test System by Lancaster University will be used
to realize if there are statistically significant differences between the corpora.
10
Lists of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb collocates were created and then the collocates were ranked based on
their normalized frequency (per 10,000 words). The 10 first were examined.
11
According to the creator of the tool (based on the email exchange between him and the author of this thesis), the
more complicated the search, the more errors the tool presents. In this case, creating a collocational list of a two-
word lemma, in a specific sub-corpus while considering the MI score was not possible.
32
4. Results
As above-mentioned, for the analysis of the corpus, a combination of collocational and

concordance analysis will be made. In particular, lists of collocates for all four lemmas will be
presented and analyzed before examining a sample of their concordances. The results will also be
presented with tables, figures, and examples from the corpus to help in their comprehension.
4.1. Pre-Referendum period (2013–2016)
4.1.1. Immigrant
4.1.1.1. Collocational analysis
Firstly, the lemma immigrant is examined. The first most frequent collocate is the adjective illegal.
In particular, the word illegal appears 354 times in this sub-corpus, and it collocates with the lemma
immigrant, 194 times (54.80%), suggesting that immigration is highly related to the theme of
Legality and in particular to illegality.
Moreover, the second most frequent collocate is the adjective undocumented which even though it
could be argued that is less offensive since it does not imply illegal activities, rather a failure to
present the proper documents to the authorities (Demby 2013), it is still related to the theme of
Legality, which is regularly referenced negatively in regards to RASIM (Baker et al. 2008: 286).
What is interesting is that the opposite of illegal, the adjective legal is not only missing from the
most frequent collocates of immigrant but out of the 184 times it appears in the whole sub-corpus,
it only collocates with immigrant 2 times, which could suggest that the media are highly concerned
with the unlawful aspect of immigration.
33
Table 2 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Immigrant in the pre-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).
N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

1 Illegal 194 3.95
2 Undocumented 15 0.31
3 Estimated 15 0.31
4 Mexican 12 0.24
5 Suspected 11 0.22
6 Smuggled 7 0.14
7 Hundred 6 0.12
8 Growth 6 0.12
9 Contribution 5 0.10
10 Africans 5 0.10
Other collocates of the lemma immigrant which are also possibly related to the theme of Legality
are the words suspected and smuggled. Expanding the concordance lines of suspected, all 11
instances of the collocate are phrased as suspected illegal immigrant(s) which even though they do
not characterize the immigrants directly as illegal, since suspected is denoting a degree of
12
uncertainty, nonetheless searching the collocates of the word in a general corpus (iWeb) (see
Figure 10), a lot of them are suggesting negative discourses (terrorist, fraud, suffer, violation).
Smuggled could also have negative connotations, since even though the immigrants are not the
actors in this case, but the object of smuggling, they are the object of illegal activity.
Figure 10 Information on “Suspected” in the iWeb Corpus.
12
“The iWeb corpus contains 14 billion words (about 14 times the size of COCA) in 22 million web pages. It is
related to many other corpora of English that we have created (and which were formerly known as the "BYU
Corpora", and they offer unparalleled insight into variation in English.”(Davies 2013).
34
Another interesting topic arising from these collocates is the Quantification of the immigrants
which is indicated by the words estimated, hundred, and growth. In the case of estimated 12 of the
15 instances refer to a type of quantification, while 2 refer to the origin of the immigrants and one
to the estimated time, some immigrants have stayed in the fridge of transported goods. The theme
of Quantification could be regarded as negative discourse since it could portray immigration as an
ever-growing problem (Baker 2006: 79).
Moreover, another pattern emerging is that of Ethnicity. Mexican and African were among the ten
most frequent collocates in the list. Mexican refers to Mexican immigrants in the US and in the
majority of the cases, it is accompanied with a type of quantification, while African is referring
either to South Africans who were blaming immigrants for taking their jobs or to immigrants of
African origin (Examples 1–2).
(1) the growth in the Mexican immigrant population in the last year is large and statically
significant (Daily Mail, 13 August 2014)
(2) some South Africans have accused the immigrants of taking jobs and opportunities away
from them (Daily Mail, 18 April 2015)
Contribution is the 9th collocate in the list and refers to the contribution of immigrants to the society,
except for one case where it was used to refer to financial contribution immigrants should pay for
their healthcare.
However, since this frequency list is based on MI and since MI tends to favor low-frequency words,
collocate lists based on the frequency of the words are also extracted (Table 4).
Table 3 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Immigrant during the pre-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Illegal 194 3.95
2 Children 30 0.61
3 Country 27 0.55
4 Number 27 0.55
5 Population 21 0.43
6 Said 21 0.43
7 Million 17 0.35
8 Group 16 0.33
9 Year 16 0.33
10 Released 16 0.33
35
Similar to the previous list, illegal is the most frequent collocate, while there are also collocates
related to the theme of Number such as number, population, and million. Regarding the theme of
Number or Quantification, since the NOW tool does not categorize all the different numerical
instances together as one collocate, as do other corpus analyzing programs (Sketch Engine for
example), the lemma is searched also with the POS (Part Of Speech) tag num.CARD which is
searching for the numerical values and instances which collocate with the lemma. Out of 153
instances, 115 of them (2.32 normalized frequency per 10,000 words) constituted a form of
quantification for immigrant, therefore re-enforcing the theme of Number that was already
observed through other collocates.
The second most frequent collocate is the word children. This could suggest that perhaps a fair
amount of those immigrating were children. Expanding its concordance lines, though, not all of the
30 instances refer to immigrant children. In general, issues related to children perhaps could be
regarded as less negative, since children are one of the most vulnerable categories (Example 3) and
therefore, they are not usually thought to be actors and instigators of illegal activities although
often they could be involved unwillingly in those. However, children also denote the continuation
of the family line, that of their immigrant parents, which could imply the future multiplication of
immigrant background.
A fair number of concordances of the collocate refer to the issue of education of (illegal) immigrant
children and the current, at the time, policies of the UK government to not allow immigrant children
to state education. Instead, the policy of the Ukip party was to make the parents of those children
pay for private education for five years until they can finally join state education. What is more,
the topic of Legality is present in this collocate too since 14 out of the 30 concordance lines refer
to them as illegal immigrant children or children of illegal immigrants. (Examples 4–5).
(3) a bi-partisan Senate probe has looked into the " systematic " vulnerability of immigrant
children (The Independent, 01 February 2016)
(4) Nigel Farage has said children of new immigrants should not be allowed state education
until they have lived in the UK for five years (The Independent, 16 March 2015)
(5) a makeshift detention center in Arizona holding 700 illegal immigrant children (Daily Mail,
9 June 2014)
36
The third most frequent collocate is the word country, which at first glance, it might imply the
origin country of the immigrants. However, expanding the concordance lines of the collocate, in
the majority of the cases, refers to the country the immigrants were moving to (e.g., UK, US) since
it mentions the immigrants entering the country, or it refers to the immigrant population of the
country. In only one out of the 27 concordance lines, country refers to the country of origin of the
immigrant. In addition, themes of Number, Legality, Residence, and Entry ate present in the
expanded concordances, which, as already mentioned, are used to negative reference RASIM
(Baker et al, 2008: 256) (Examples 6–8).
(6) Immigrants living in the country illegally generally are not eligible for federal welfare
benefits already. (Daily Mail, 10 March 2016)
(7) In total, the country's immigrant population has grown by 4.1million from 2011 to 2015.
(Daily Mail, 13 August 2015)
(8) while the number of immigrants entering the country after being found to have false
documents has risen dramatically (The Independent, 24 August 2014)
Group is also another collocate, which except for one instance, it refers to a group of
(illegal/undocumented/[number]) of immigrants which again bring up the themes of Legality and
Number. Moreover, the word group could also be considered as a linguistic tool that creates the
impression of an “indistinguishable mass or vague quantity” which has been linked with racist
discourses (Baker, 2006: 88).
Year is also related to the theme of Number since the majority of the concordances of the collocate
mentions the number of immigrants who arrived in that year or in general, information on their
numbers per year or recent year (Examples 9–10).
(9) there are more and more immigrants, hundreds a year coming into this town (The Guardian,
14 December 2014)
(10) Last year the number of immigrants dropped by 89,000 to 153,000. (Telegraph, 17 July
2013)
Said is another important collocate since it is used to quote the opinions of often important actors,
such as authorities, politicians, and organizations and in a few cases to refer to local people or the
immigrant themselves. (Examples 11–13). However, the fact that in the majority of the
37
concordances of the collocate, the opinion of the immigrants themselves is missing, could suggest
that their voice is not often heard in the media.
(11) Britain's Christian heritage has allowed it to be more welcoming of immigrants, David
Cameron has said (Telegraph, 23 December 2015)
(12) A Home Office spokesman said if an illegal immigrant is discovered in the UK they are
detained (BBC News, 19 March 2015)
(13) the OECD said the number of permanent immigrants entering the UK remains 15 per cent
below pre-crisis levels of 2007. (Telegraph, 1 December 2014)
Finally, released is also referring to the theme of Legality since its concordance lines refer to
immigrants being released from jail, criminal charges, or issues of deportation (Examples 14–16).
(14) Immigration officials say local authorities across the US released thousands of immigrants
from jails this year (The Guardian, 17 October 2014)
(15) And he believes some of the immigrants who are being released will commit new crimes
(The Guardian, 17 October 2014)
(16) The immigrants who were released still eventually face deportation and are required to
appear for upcoming court (Daily Mail, 2 March 2013)
4.1.1.2. Concordance analysis
In order to examine whether any other patterns of speech may have been missed, concordance
samples are examined. After sorting them there are a few noticeable patterns that were also present
in the collocational analysis, such as themes of Legality (Examples 17–18) or Number (Example
19–21) and were mostly negative.
(17) Criminal gangs are smuggling illegal immigrants out of the UK (The Independent, 21
January 2013)
(18) Officers arrested the immigrants after they were found stowed away in the back of a lorry
(Telegraph, 23 January 2016)
(19) there are 42.8 million immigrants in the country (Daily Mail, 31 January 2013)
(20) to receive and offer initial care to hundreds of immigrants on a crippled freighter (Belfast
Telegraph (Belfast Telegraph, 26 November 2014)
38
(21) The Scottish capital Edinburgh is home to the highest number of immigrants.
(Workpermit.com, 16 December 2013)
Examples 18 and 20 also present immigrants as “transported goods” which according to Baker
(2006: 81) is a way to dehumanize them. Other discourse patterns which are also negative are those
that imply that immigrants are an “economic problem” (Examples 22–23).
(22) take our money through taxes and they use it to help immigrants. They 're destroying our
country (The Independent, 22 August 2014)
(23) Where one immigrant means one less job for an American. (Telegraph, 5 March 2013)
However, other concordances reveal more positive discourses towards immigrants, mentioning
their contributions to society, campaigns, and movements of support towards them, as well as the
struggles they are facing (Examples 24–26).
(24) 14% of start-up businesses in the UK were founded by immigrant entrepreneurs
(Workpermit.com, 14 March 2014)
(25) Advocates for more inclusive immigration policy argue immigrants' economic
contributions (Daily Mail, 07 September 2014)
(26) America 's innovators are far more likely to be immigrants with advanced degrees who
have paid their dues (Daily Mail, 24 February 2016)
(27) 'Celebrate, don't vilify' immigrants says the Movement Against Xenophobia (MAX)
(Workpermit.com, 16 February 2015)
Another interesting discourse which is used as a form of quantification is the one which is using
water metaphors to depict the movement of immigrants. Words like wave or flow make
immigration seem dehumanized and like a force of nature as Baker suggests (2006: 80–81.) and
therefore, it is something unpredictable which needs to be controlled. (Examples 28–29).
(28) Britain could see a "tidal wave" of immigrants from Yugoslavia on live television
yesterday evening (The Independent, 11 January 2014)
(29) Its analysis suggests that Britain's borrowing as a proportion of GDP would rise to 99 per
cent if there is a steady flow of immigrants (Daily Mail, 17 July 2013)
39
4.1.2. Migrant
The collocational analysis of the lemma migrant reveals several discourses which are similar to the
ones found in the analysis of immigrant. Words such as undocumented, sneak, smuggle refer to the
theme of Legality and in particular suggest that those people entered the country secretly (smuggle,
sneak) or without proper documentation (undocumented).
Another collocate which could be considered to have negative connotations, as suggested in the
analysis of the previous lemma is the word flow. Flow is a water metaphor and according to Baker
(2008: 81), this type of metaphor dehumanizes the image of the migrant and as a consequence
transforms the movement of migrants as a “force of nature” which is unpredictable and
uncontrollable.
However, in this list, the most prominent collocate is the adjective economic which is in line with
the definitions presented in chapter two, where migrants are considered those who are moving
especially in the search for work. Moreover, economic seems to act in a way as a distinction
between this category and the category of refugees or asylum seekers in the majority of the cases
(out of 36 instances, 5 of them did not refer directly to the lemma migrant.). Many of the
concordance lines are making this distinction and in one they use nationality to distinguish between
refugees and economic migrants (Example 30).
(30) Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis
and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic
migrants and told to turn back. (The Independent, 23 December 2015)
What is interesting though, is the disclaimer by BBC which explains how it uses the term migrant:
A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all people on the move
who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people
fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well
as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule
are economic migrants. (BBC News, 22 February 2016)
40
Based on this categorization, migrant seems to be like an umbrella term which is used to encompass
the terms refugee and economic migrant and perhaps asylum seeker as well, and therefore does
comply with the definitions examined in chapter two of this paper.
Moreover, one can assume that one of the reasons there is a need for the distinction between
economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers is the large number of people arriving in Europe
after the war in Syria in 201513, with some discourses suggesting that not all those people are
thought to be asylum seekers or refugees but economic migrants trying to falsely claim asylum.
(Example 31–32).
(31) Whatever view is taken of the plight of the Syrian refugees fleeing Isis, they can certainly
not be labelled " bogus asylum-seekers ", "economic migrants" or " benefits tourists ". As
every account of the pitiful devastation in that once-peaceful society demonstrates, for
many of these people it is a choice between flight from their homes and death. (The
Independent, 26 November 2014)
(32) First, we need to assert the legitimacy of the asylum claims, based on the routes taken, the
countries fled, the extent of the conflicts that we all know. Too much time is wasted on
who's an economic migrant and who's a refugee (The Guardian, 17 January 2016)
One prominent collocate is the word Cuban, forming the cluster Cuban migrants. However, it only
appears within a small time frame (27–30 December 2015) and it is referring to the deportation of
Cuban migrants from Costa Rica and Nicaragua closing its borders to Costa Rica and Cuban
migrants (Deutsche Welle, 2015), and could be regarded as a type of “seasonal collocate” (Baker
et al. 2008: 286).
Another collocate is the verb rescued which is used to describe situations where migrants were
saved from a dangerous situation such as drowning, and therefore it might reveal more positive
discourses towards them since it could evoke the sympathy of the reader. What it is interesting
though, when expanding the concordance lines of the collocate, is that in 3 out of the 11
concordance lines those rescued migrants are also characterized as illegal, which has negative
connotations and therefore it might create mixed feelings to the reader who on one hand might feel
sympathy when reading that a lot of those people died or almost died. On the other hand, though,
13
More information regarding the Mediterranean Refugee and Migrant Sea Arrivals Data at:
https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/47215
41
the reader might think that there are plenty of people who are trying to enter the country illegally,
and therefore it is their fault if they end up being hurt in the process.
300 is used to quantify the migrants. On that note, as in the previous section, all the numerical
values which collocate with migrant will be further explored down below. Geneva-based is part of
the title of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migrants and therefore, it is not
characterizing the migrants in some way.
Another interesting collocate is the would-be, which refers to would-be migrants and which
according to Biao (2014) are “people who prepare for migrating overseas to the extent that their
present lives are significantly changed”. In the concordance lines of the collocate, the articles refer
to those that have not been able to get the status of the migrant in some cases also because they
never made it to the destination country because they died on the way (Examples 32–33).
(33) Dozens of would-be migrants are reported to have drowned between Libya and Sicily, the
latest tragedy in the Mediterranean this spring. (The Guardian, 18 November 2014).
(34) In a separate incident on Wednesday, coastguards caught two suspected smugglers and
rounded up 45 Syrian would-be migrants heading from Mugla province in southwest
Turkey to the Greek island of Symi, local media reported. (Daily Mail, 24 December 2015).
Table 4 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Migrant in the pre-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).

1 Economic 37 0.75
3 Cuban 13 0.26
4 Flow 12 0.24
5 Rescued 11 0.22
6 300 9 0.18
7 Sneak 7 0.14
8 Would-be 7 0.14
9 Smuggle 7 0.14
10 Geneva-based 5 0.10
Examining now the most frequent collocates regardless of their MI score, there are a few
similarities with the previously discussed words. There is the topic of Quantification, which is
denoted by the words thousands and number, and the issue of Legality denoted with the word
illegal. With regards to the topic of Quantification, as done in the previous lemma, all the numerical
collocates of migrant were be investigated to see how prominent the topic of Quantification is with
42
the lemma migrant. In particular, out of 276 numerical instance collocates, 200 of them
(normalized frequency per 10,000 words at 4.07) are some form of quantification with regards to
migrants (and in a couple of cases to asylum seekers), thus reinforcing the quantification pattern
which was already observed.
Moreover, migrant seems to be used as a synonym for refugee or asylum seeker, which is at odds
with the definitions presented in chapter two. This assumption is explained by the fact that refugees
and asylum are among its most frequent collocates. Expanding the concordance lines of refugee, a
great number of them consists of the construction [migrant and refugees], which is used either with
quantification expressions or to refer to their entry or transit (see Figure 11). Expanding the
concordance lines of asylum, there, asylum is used either as asylum seeker or to form the expression
claim asylum, therefore equating migrants with asylum seekers (Examples 35–36).
(35) Migrants who wish to claim asylum on arrival in Britain must first make themselves known
to the authorities. (Daily Mail, 12 August 2015)
(36) and registered in will be the one that hears their claim of asylum. Those migrants heading
for family members in Germany (Middle East Eye, 6 September 2014)
Figure 11 Concordance lines of the collocate refugee (Migrant, pre-referendum).
Similarly, with the adjective economic, workers is a collocate which seemed to refer to the fact
that, unlike refugees and asylum seekers, the purpose of migration is work and is related to financial
reasons which as above-mentioned complies with the definition of the term discussed in chapter
43
two. Expanding their concordance lines, a number of those concordances were painting the
migrants in a positive light since they revealed the struggles migrant workers had to face like being
discriminated against or exploited by their employers (Examples 37–38) while others mentioned
their contribution to the society (Examples 39–40).
(37) Non-payment and late payment of wages is one of the biggest concerns to migrant workers
(International Business Times UK, 16 January 2014)
(38) The legal minimum wage for a day's work is currently fixed at 33 euro but migrant workers
rarely get paid more than 15 euro. Most often than not, they don't get paid at all.
(Huffington Post UK, 23 April 2013)
(39) The truth is that migrant health workers are underpinning the UK's health services. (The
Guardian, 6 January 2015)
(40) Migrant workers play a vital role in Scotland's economy and many of our successful
businesses (The Independent, 24 May 2014)
The adverb up does not directly suggest some type of discourse for the migrants, although by
expanding its concordances lines, some patterns of speech can be observed like the quantification
of migrants (Examples 41–42) or their dehumanization with expressions of passive verbs for their
transportation (Examples 43–44).
(41) There are currently up to 1000 migrants living rough in Calais (Daily Mail, 22 May 2014)
(42) wait in line to board the cargo ship, which will hold up to 2,500 migrants (Daily Mail, 16
August 2015)
(43) Around 75,000 migrants have been picked up trying to enter Italy and Greece from Libya
so far (Daily Mail, 2 June 2015)
(44) An investigation by this newspaper has found dozens of migrants are being put up in hotels
in Lancashire (Daily Mail, 1 August 2015)
Similarly with immigrant, said is used to refer, in the majority of the cases, to the opinions of
official authorities and personalities such as the IOM (International Organisation for Migration) or
Mrs. May and in some cases to refer to the opinions of the migrants themselves. (Examples 45–
46). However, the fact that only a few instances are mentioning the opinion of the migrants
themselves, could suggest, similarly with the immigrant, that their voices are not often heard.
44
(45) the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) have said more than one million
migrants and refugees reached Europe in 2015 (Daily Mail, 3 January 2016)
(46) Waves broke over the inflatables, and some people fell into the water as they climbed onto
the ship and had to be rescued by other migrants,' said 23-year-old Mahmoud Hassan, who
is from the city of Aleppo, the fiercest battleground of the Syrian conflict. (Daily Mail, 16
January 2015)
Other does not reveal much about its discourses unless examined through its concordances. In
particular, it could be argued that it is used to group migrants and, in some cases, to group them
with refugees or asylum seekers, which could be suggesting the synonymity of the terms as already
seen by the examination of other collocates (Examples 47–48).
(47) Secure these, the argument goes, and the flood of refugees and other migrants arriving by
boat in Europe will drop dramatically. (BBC News, 14 December 2015)
(48) authorities with the power to search clothes and luggage of asylum seekers -- and other
migrants without a permit to stay in Denmark (Channel 4 News, 18 December 2015)
Table 5 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Migrant during the pre-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Refugees 86 1.75
2 Said 57 1.16
3 Workers 53 1.08
4 Thousands 41 0.84
5 Illegal 38 0.77
6 Economic 37 0.75
7 Up 37 0.75
8 Other 33 0.67
9 Number 30 0.61
10 Asylum 29 0.59
Examining now some samples of the concordances of the lemma migrant, similar patterns with the
collocational analysis are found. First of all, there is the quantification of migrants (Example 49),
which also dehumanizes them as discussed above with the construction of the water metaphor.
(49) with more than two million Syrian refugees and a wave of migrants from Syria and other
countries pouring across Turkey to Europe. (Daily Mail, 13 January 2016).
45
In addition, as it was observed in the previous section, there are instances where migrants are
treated as a type of synonym of the word refugee, they are characterized as illegal, and there are
also discourses which mention their exploitation and struggles as well as their status as economic
migrants or workers (Examples 50–53).
(50) about 10,000 illegal migrants were granted permission to remain in the UK
(Workpermit.com, 11 January 2013)
(51) reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos (The
Independent, 23 December 2015)
(52) provided evidence to the confederation of the exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat
(The Guardian, 13 September 2014)
(53) It said: "Economic migrants, in particular, are generally young and healthy and as such do
not make major demands on health services." (The Independent, 04 April 2013)
4.1.3. Refugee
At a first glance, there seems to be a different set of collocates for this lemma. The most frequent
in this list is the word Syrian, which reveals probably that most of the refugees during that
timeframe come from Syria, due to the ongoing war which resulted in many people seeking asylum
in Europe, especially during 201514. In fact, Syrian collocates with refugee in 48.08% of its
instances in the pre-referendum sub-corpus.
The second most frequent collocate is the word camp which is referring to the refugee camps where
refugees stay. This is related to the theme of Residence, which, as already mentioned is usually
used to negatively reference RASIM. However, in this case, it perhaps has more positive
connotations since the surrounding discourses show that refugee camps are places where the
conditions are nothing but optimal since they have to accommodate a great number of refugees and
14
More information regarding the Mediterranean Refugee and Migrant Sea Arrivals Data at:
https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/47215
46
are usually organized very fast depending on the current needs and require external aid. (Examples
54–56).
(54) Millions of families are spending this winter in refugee camps or makeshift shelters across
Syria and the Middle East (Telegraph, 23 December 2015)
(55) Sahly now lives in one of Beirut's dirty and overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps. (The
Guardian, 10 December 2014)
(56) With snow falling regularly and many of the refugees living in flimsy tented camps,
temperatures plunge nightly below freezing (Daily Mail, 23 December 2013)
The UN is the third most frequent collocate and expanding its concordance lines, it is revealed that
the UN refers either to the UN High Commissioner or the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) which is
another way to refer to the UN High Commissioner. Other concordance lines mention the UN as
the actor talking or reporting on the topic of refugees and there is one concordance referring to UN
refugee camps. The mention of a non-profit organization which helps refugees is also another
example which is perhaps painting the refugees in a more positive light as they are a group of
people who need the help of external organizations to survive. Nonetheless, since they require help,
it means also that they constitute a problem and therefore, there could have both positive and
negative associations. What is more, the word commissioner is also one of the collocates in this list
which also refers to the UN High Commissioner, further re-enforcing the above-discussed themes.
Another frequent collocate is the word status, which is referring to the refugee status, and in
particular to the people who are trying to obtain the refugee status or people who have already
obtained the refugee status. It could be argued that perhaps the status topic would be categorized
under the theme of Legality as acquiring the status of refugee is a formal procedure that requires
proper documentation that needs processing. However, unlike the collocates belonging to the theme
of Legality which has been discussed before (illegal, smuggle), status seems to be more neutral,
and searching the term in iWeb, shows that it has some positive connotations too since it collocates
with words which can be interpreted as positive (achieve, legal, honorably) (see Figure 12).
47
Figure 12 Information on "Status" in the iWeb Corpus.
Welcome is another collocate in the list that reveals a positive discourse. (Examples 57–58). Plight,
on the other hand, reveals negative discourses since it characterizes the entering of the refugees as
a tragic event (Baker 2006: 83).
(57) And the rest of Europe echoed her compassion. " Refugees welcome " placards were
everywhere. (The Independent, 22 December 2015)
(58) Advertisement Bishop of Exeter urges people to welcome refugees (ITV News, 15
December 2015)
Prepares refers to the receiving of refugees. However, expanding its concordances, only 4 out of
27 instances are visible as concordance lines. The reason for these missing lines, as mentioned in
the description of the tool’s disadvantages, is because they are likely to be “duplicate”. Therefore,
it could be argued that this collocate is not important in the analysis of the discourses on refugees
since its high frequency is due to “copying errors” by the tool. A similar issue is observed also for
the collocate Belfast and therefore it will be ignored for this analysis.
Finally, resettle could have more negative connotations since it may suggest that refugees are that
many that no longer fit in their current settlement and therefore they need to be resettled.
Nonetheless, at the same time, resettling is a difficult and tiring process for the refugees themselves
and therefore, it might create some sympathy towards refugees.
48
Table 6 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Refugee in the pre-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).

1 Syrian 300 6.11
2 Camps 73 1.49
3 UN 72 1.47
4 Status 57 1.16
5 Commissioner 36 0.73
6 Welcome 36 0.73
7 Belfast 33 0.67
8 Prepares 27 0.55
9 Plight 16 0.33
10 Resettle 13 0.26
Examining now at the 10 most frequent collocates, regardless of their MI Score, a slightly different
list appears (See Table 7). Syrian and camp (and camps in the plural in the 6th position) remain the
top collocates, and status also remains in the top ten. However, the rest of the collocates are
different. The 3rd most frequent collocate is the word migrants which as observed previously it also
collocates with refugee and thus it may be suggesting that these terms are used synonymously up
to a point (Examples 59–60).
(59) Claims have been made that EU funding is being used to deport refugees # The claim
means migrants could then be going on a migrant merrygoround (Express, 17 December
2015)
(60) The group of migrants and refugees were helped to disembark by volunteers, although
several were forced to wade to the beach after falling overboard. (Daily Mail, 03 January
2016).
Million and number suggest Quantification and can be viewed as negative discourses since they
denote the ever-growing problem of the refugees (Examples 61–63). Similarly with the previous
sections, all the numerical collocates were examined. Out of 415 numerical instances, 283
(normalized frequency at 10,000 is 5.76) of them refer to a type of Quantification related to
refugees and therefore re-enforcing the Quantification pattern.
(61) There are already over 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, but their current camps can
only hold 200,000 people. (The Independent, 6 May 2016).
49
(62) However, a too high number of refugees put pressure on the Danish society and make it
more difficult to ensure a successful integration of those who come to Denmark. (Channel
4, 18 December 2015).
(63) Either way, the tens of thousands of refugees who have crossed the border in recent days
may be in Turkey for a long time, aid workers say. (Daily Mail, 29 September 2014).
Said is used to denote the opinion of important people, such as representatives of official
organizations, such as the UN High Commissioner, the Refugee Council head of advocacy, or the
then president of Germany, Joachim Gauck. However, in a small number of cases, the collocate
was used to share the stories of refugees (Example 64), which also suggests that the voices of the
refugees, just like for the cases of immigrants and migrants are not often voiced in the news.
(64) Manthri Ranasing, a refugee from Sri Lanka, said he and his family had suffered racial
abuse (Daily Mail, 20 January 2016)
Children is one of the most frequent collocates, which in the majority of the cases (in 3 instances,
the word children is used to refer to a children’s hospital, to a dictionary entry, and to the name of
an agency) is referring to the children of refugees, who are also refugees themselves and the
problems they have to face, such as lack of education, working and living under difficult
circumstances (Examples 65–67).
(65) The 5 percent demand - which represents 160,000 refugees - is backed by many aid and
refugee groups including Oxfam, Save the Children, Refugee Council and Amnesty
International. (Reuters, 8 December 2014).
(66) Oxford University Press have declared " refugee " to be the Children's Word of the Year,
based on their analysis of just under 123,500 short stories that entered BBC Radio 2's 500
Words competition. (Oxford Student, 5 June 2016).
(67) An estimated 80% of Syrian refugee children already in Turkey are unable to attend school.
Refugee children beg for water near the Turkey-Syria border. (The Independent, 6 May
2016).
Other frequent collocates of the lemma such as crisis and influx reveal rather negative discourses
as they portray the topic as a problem as the word crisis reveals and by dehumanizing them through
50
the construction of the water metaphor as observed in some cases for the lemmas immigrant and
migrant.
Table 7 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Refugee during the pre-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Syrian 300 6.11
2 Camp 100 2.04
3 Migrants 88 1.79
4 Said 85 1.73
5 Crisis 74 1.51
6 Camps 73 1.49
7 Million 60 1.22
8 Children 57 1.16
9 Status 57 1.16
10 Number 52 1.06
Moving on to a sample of concordances of lemma refugee and after sorting them, there are certain
discourses which are confirming the ones found in the collocational analysis as well the ones used
to describe immigrants and migrants. Firstly, as noticed for the case of immigrants, refugees are
presided by words that quantify them and thus possibly indicating the fear of an ever-growing
situation.
In addition, as discussed in the collocational analysis, this topic is regarded as a crisis, as a problem
which needs to be addressed (Examples 68–69).
(68) In an effort to stem the flow, the European Union, which is facing its biggest refugee crisis
since the Second World War, has earmarked billions for Turkey to deal with migrants in its
territory. (Daily Mail, 25 December 2015).
(69) More than 21,000 Syrian babies have been born as refugees since the crisis began nearly
three years ago with many living in appalling conditions amid the freezing temperatures of
winter in makeshift camps. (Daily Mail, 23 December 2013).
Moreover, as briefly observed in the collocational analysis refugees are dehumanized by either
using metaphors of water and natural disasters (Examples 70–71).
(70) Secure these, the argument goes, and the flood of refugees and other migrants arriving by
boat in Europe (BBC News, 14 December 2015)
51
(71) the world responds to refugee crises such as the Syrian emergency (The Guardian, 16
December 2015)
In addition, as already observed through the lemma’s collocates, there are also discourses which
seem to indicate support towards refugees. In the corpus, there are mentions of “charitable work”
towards them and agencies helping them like the UNHCR. Moreover, there are also more examples
of their struggles and the difficult conditions they are facing (Examples 72–73).
(72) She helped the refugee children, who were soaked from their treacherous crossing on the
boats (Daily Mail, 19 December 2015).
(73) Around 26 of the asylum seekers who were hosed down were reportedly survivors of a
tragedy off the island in October, when more than 350 refugees drowned after their boat
capsized close to Lampedusa's shore. (Telegraph, 18 December 2013).
4.1.4. Asylum Seeker
For the lemma asylum seeker, only the collocates based on frequency were examined as the NOW
tool was showing an error page when the MI score was ticked in the research criteria. As mentioned
earlier, the tool has a harder time processing more complicated search queries and therefore, the
researcher needs to modify sometimes their methods (Table 8).
Looking into the ten most frequent collocates, similarly with the previously analyzed lemmas, some
already discussed patterns appear. The first collocate on the list is the verb said which is used to
either refer to the opinions of the asylum seekers or to refer to the sayings of some official
authorities and personalities such as MPs, Nigel Farage, and spokespeople.
Another frequent collocate is the word refugees which when examining its concordance lines, in a
fair number of cases, it has the structure [asylum seekers and refugees], therefore suggesting that
they are categorized together and hence used synonymously, which according to the definitions
discussed in chapter two, is expected that there will be some overlapping due to some of the
similarities in their meaning (see Figure 13).
52
Figure 13 Concordance lines of the collocate refugee (Asylum Seeker, pre-referendum).
However, another frequent collocate is the word migrants, which as was examined in the previous
sections, collocates with refugees and asylum (seeker). In addition, a similar construction is
observed for the collocate migrants suggesting the overlapping of the terms, as was discussed in
the analysis of the lemma migrant.
The theme of Accommodation/Residence is also present for the asylum seeker as it was for refugee.
In particular, apart from the collocate accommodation, home and housed are also among the most
frequent collocates which belong to the same topic. Accommodation as an issue is rather important
for the asylum seekers as their migration is not planned ahead and also when considering the
numbers of asylum seekers who arrived after the war in Syria in 2015. Detention is also another
collocate which belongs to the theme of Accommodation, but it also belongs to the topic of Legality
since detention might bring to mind criminal detention and it could suggest more negative
discourses when examining the topics and collocates of the word in iWeb (see Figure 14).
53
Figure 14 Information on “Detention” in the iWeb Corpus.
Country as a collocate here is used in the majority of the cases, to the country that hosts the asylum
seekers and, in a few cases, the country of origin of the asylum seekers. In some of these
concordance lines, there is mention of the costs that asylum seekers cost the country or the large
amount of them entering the country and therefore, in those cases country might be used to create
a divide perhaps, between “us” and “they”. However, there are discourses, which seem more
positive towards asylum seekers when referring to other countries, such as Australia, and their
foreign policy which seemed to be rather “hostile” towards asylum seekers. (Examples 74–75)
(74) The British taxpayer is wasting " enormous " sums of money prosecuting genuine asylum
seekers who came to this country on false passports, the chairman of the Criminal Cases
Review Commission has warned. (Telegraph, 14 January 2014)
(75) The bill would remove almost all references to the UN Refugee Convention in Australia's
Migration Act, replacing them with Australia's own interpretation of the convention. It
would also grant the government the power to take an asylum seeker to a foreign country,
even if that foreign country was hostile and had not agreed to accept them. (The Guardian,
15 October 2014)
The collocate number suggests quantification patterns. What is more, as done for the previous
lemmas, all the numerical collocates were searched in order to see whether there are more
quantification patterns in this lemma too. Out of 157 numerical collocates with asylum seeker, 100
of them (normalized frequency per 10,000 words is 2.04) are a form that quantifies them and
54
therefore reinforcing the theme of Quantification and the ever-growing problem of people arriving
in need of asylum which suggests negative connotations.
Another interesting collocate is the word gay. Looking further into their concordance lines, some
of them seem to be referring to the Manus island in Australia where asylum seekers seem to be
discriminated against based on their sexuality, while others refer to the European Court of Justice’s
decision to ban “gay tests” for asylum seekers in response to cases of LGBTQ people asked to go
to extreme lengths to prove their sexuality when applying for an asylum based on the fact that their
sexuality is considered illegal in their country (Examples 76–77).
(76) Advocates argue that the cases of gay asylum seekers on Manus highlight that the
resettlement deal with PNG, announced by former prime minister Kevin Rudd on 19 July
2013 is in direct violation of Australia's non-refoulement obligations under the refugee
convention. (The Guardian, 23 September 2014).
(77) Gay and lesbian asylum seekers must not be asked to prove they are homosexual in order
to stay in Britain, following a judgement by a European court yesterday. (Telegraph, 3
December 2014).
Those discourses although negative, do paint those asylum seekers in a more positive light since
they show how they are maltreated by the authorities. Nonetheless, the collocate perhaps could be
considered as a “seasonal” collocate (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 11) since a fair number of
discourses are coming from the same article and in addition when comparing the phrase GAY
ASYLUM SEEKER (the caps are used to lemmatize the phrase) with the whole NOW corpus, its
per million frequency is very low and it does not seem to be appearing consistently (see Figure 15).
Figure 15 The phrase "Gay Asylum Seeker" in the NOW Corpus per year.
55
Table 8 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Asylum Seeker during the pre-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Said 30 0.61
2 Refugees 28 0.57
3 Number 23 0.47
4 Migrants 21 0.43
5 Accommodation 19 0.39
6 Gay 18 0.37
7 Country 15 0.31
8 Home 15 0.31
9 Housed 15 0.31
10 Detention 14 0.29
As observed at the collocational analysis, themes of Accommodation and especially Quantification

are rather prominent in the concordance analysis of the lemma as well (Examples 78–79). In
addition, example 78 uses a natural disaster (tsunami) which is also a water metaphor, and as
already discussed it could suggest the uncontrollable nature of the issue.
(78) Indonesia could release a "human tsunami" of 10,000 asylum seekers on Australia (The
Guardian, 10 March 2015).
(79) Referring to Rotherham, the report said "the town currently has the highest number of
asylum seekers in the region, including higher numbers than in Leeds, the biggest city in
the area. (BBC Sport, 17 January 2014).
Moreover, there are discourses which highlight their struggles and problems and therefore are more
positive towards them (Examples 80–82).
(80) As a result asylum seekers and migrants face many obstacles even to register their claims.
Those who do not succeed to lodge an application are often detained in inhuman conditions
(Huffington Post, 23 April 2013).
(81) There is no excuse for Jordan to deport vulnerable asylum seekers back to Sudan,
regardless of how they entered the country (Middle East Eye, 18 December 2015).
(82) Devastating cases of sexual and physical abuse of asylum seekers' children as young as
two have been laid bare by a former senior child protection worker at the Australian-run
56
detention centre in an explosive submission to a Senate inquiry. (The Guardian, 4 June
2015)
In addition, there are some negative discourses which mention asylum seekers being involved in
illegal activities (Examples 83–85)
(83) following the sexual assaults allegedly carried out by asylum seekers in the German city
of Cologne on New Year 's Eve (Telegraph, 11 January 2016)
(84) report claims that guards were "seriously assaulted" by asylum seekers (The Guardian, 26
February 2014)
(85) in the Home Office systems for keeping track of certain asylum seekers and those staying
illegally in Britain (The Guardian, 17 December 2015)
4.2. Post-Referendum Period (2016–2019)
Following the same steps as in the pre-referendum period, firstly the most frequent collocates of
the lemmas within a span of 5 words to the left and the right of the KWIC were studied in order to
draw some initial conclusions before moving on to the concordance analysis. Similarly, with the
previous time period, first, the most frequent collocates, taking into account their MI score, were
examined (except for asylum seeker due to technical issues with the NOW corpus), after which,
the ten most frequent lexical collocates without the MI score, were examined as well.
4.2.1. Immigrant
Starting again with the lemma immigrant, the most frequent collocate accompanying it is illegal,
which similarly with the previous section, it refers to the topic of Legality and it does have negative
connotations. However, there seems to be a small but statistically significant decrease in its
frequency. In particular, in the pre-referendum time period, its normalized frequency was 3.95
while in the post-referendum period it is 2.84. (p-value = 0.002573221, very significant). Another
collocate which belongs to the Legality topic is the word undocumented which was also observed
in the previous time period, although its frequency was much lower compared to illegal. As already
57
mentioned, undocumented can be interpreted as less offensive compared to illegal and therefore
can have more positive connotations. In this time period, its frequency has increased, and it is
highly significant (p-value = 7.234314 x 10 -7). In particular, its normalized frequency in the pre-
referendum period was 0.31 while in the post-referendum period it is 1.12 which reveals that
newspapers are trying to use more “neutral” terms when referring to immigrants. Nonetheless, the
fact that both collocates have remained, may suggest that concerns regarding the legality of the
immigrants are still present in the society.
The majority of the instances of the collocates 2–6 in the table (Table 9), refer to a single event “A
day without Immigrants” which took place on the 16th of February 2017. This event was a protest
against Donald Trump’s immigration policies and its purpose was to showcase the importance of
immigrants in society (Chappell 2017). Moreover, a fair number of the collocate instances come
from the image captioning of the articles, and in several articles, the same image gallery seems to
be used (the day without immigrants protests). Therefore, even though the reporting of a protest
that shows support towards immigrants, could be regarded as positive, the collocates should be
considered as a type of seasonal collocate, rather than a type of consistent collocate which
characterizes the discourses regarding immigrants (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 11).
Other collocates were contribution, highlight, and business. In order to better understand their
discourses, their respective concordances need to be expanded and examined. Expanding both
contribution and highlight, it is seen that both of them are used to highlight the contribution of
immigrants. However, not all of their instances are visible in their concordance lines. In particular,
for highlight only 3 out of the 28 instances are visible and for contribution only 4 out of the 28
instances are visible. This is because, those lines are likely to be duplicate and the tool has “hidden”
them, as was discussed in an earlier section. Moreover, the majority of these visible instances, seem
to be part of image captioning of the same event (A day without Immigrants) or headlines in top
stories featured inside the article. Therefore, the importance of these collocates could be contested.
Similarly, with contribution and highlight, business is also used in the same construction regarding
the contribution of immigrants to business. Moreover, also in the case of business, only 2 out of
the 27 instances are visible, and therefore even though showing positive discourses, its significance
as collocate can be contested.
58
Table 9 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Immigrant in the post-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).

1 Illegal 145 2.84
2 Without 135 2.65
3 Day 130 2.55
4 16 85 1.67
5 2017 84 1.65
6 February 82 1.65
9 Highlight 28 0.55
10. Business 27 0.53
Moving now to examining the collocates based on frequency only (Table 10), some similarities
with the previous list appear. Firstly, illegal, and undocumented are present as well contribution
and highlight. Day again refers in the majority of the cases to the “Day without Immigrants” protest.
Immigrants is one of the most frequent collocates for immigrant which is normal since “when we
talk about a topic we usually mention it several times, so very often the keyword occurs as a
collocate of itself” (Lindquist and Levin, 2018: 76).
The 4th most frequent collocate is the word children which refers to the children of immigrants and
examining their concordances, a fair number of the concordances refer to the difficult conditions
they are facing, being separated from their parents, and staying in detention (Examples 86–87),
which paints the topic in a more positive light by highlighting their struggles. Some lines also
mention that immigrant children are more likely to get a higher education degree than British
children (Example 88), which can be interpreted positively since it could imply that immigrants
(generations) can eventually contribute to the UK society.
(86) The Trump administration's move to separate immigrant parents from their children on
the US-Mexico border has grabbed attention around the world (Business Insider, 17 June
2018)
(87) a former Walmart in Texas has been converted into a detention centre for immigrant
children (BBC News, 15 June 2018)
(88) Children of immigrants are more likely to get a university degree than those with British
parents, according to a global education report. (The Independent, 15 September 2016)
59
For the collocate life, only 6 of the 29 concordance lines are available. Four of them (which are
identical and are part of image captioning) refer to the contributions immigrants make to US
business and life; one refers to life in prison sentence of an immigrant and the third one refers to
all walks of life to refer to immigrants of different backgrounds. Based on these 6 instances, positive
and negative as well as somewhat neutral discourses are observable. However, since the rest of the
26 lines are not available, which as suggested earlier is because they are likely to be duplicate, no
concrete conclusion can be drawn.
Country, similarly, with the previous sections belongs to the category of Entry and is being used
in the majority of the cases to refer to the country that the immigrants came from rather than their
country of origin. Some of these discourses are negative since they are also accompanied with the
words illegal or illegally, while others are more positive since they refer to their contribution or the
low-paying jobs they are doing, which even though it is negative for the immigrants, it might make
the reader view them in a more positive and compassionate light (Examples 89–90).
(89) Many of the immigrants in our country work low paying jobs that most Americans won't
work for (BBC News, 16 February 2017)
(90) A UKIP candidate has suggested that illegal immigrants are coming into the country on
paragliders (The New European, 20 November 2019)
Following the patterns of the previous sections, said is once again used to refer to the opinions and
to quote official authorities or personalities such as the deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants
Rights Project or ICE agents and in some cases the opinions of local people or immigrants
(Examples 91–92).
(91) the deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project, said: " The administration
can not simply get rid of all process for immigrants. (The Sun, 24 June 2018)
(92) according to owner Vanessa Dremonas, whose Greek-immigrant father started the
company. # " It's in his DNA to help immigrants, " she said. " (Daily Mail, 16 February
2017)
An interesting result from this list of collocates is that words such as number or million which
quantify the immigrants are missing. However, all the numerical collocates of the lemma are
searched in order to see if there are any quantification patterns and compare them with the ones
60
from the pre-referendum period. Out of the 312 numerical instances, only 79 (1.55 in normalized
frequency per 10,000 words) were a form of quantification of immigrants. In the pre-referendum
period, out of the 153 cases, 114 (2.32 in normalized frequency per 10,000 words) were a type of
quantification of immigrants. Therefore, there seems to be a statistically significant decrease (0.71
in normalized frequency per 10,000 words) in the quantification patterns which use numerical
values (p-value = 5.89951 x 10 -10, highly significant).
Table 10 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Immigrant during the post-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Illegal 145 2.84
2 Day 130 2.55
4 Children 51 1.00
5 Immigrants 39 0.76
6 Country 37 0.73
7 Said 37 0.73
8 Life 29 0.57
10. Highlight 28 0.55
Moving on to the concordance analysis of the lemma immigrant and keeping in mind the initial
results observed from the collocational analysis, the analysis finds that there are still those
discourses which quantify the immigrants as well as those discourses belonging to the theme of
Legality (illegal, undocumented) (Examples 93–95) as it was observed in the collocational
analysis. Examples 95 also quantify the immigrants using the water element (wave) which can have
negative discourses as already mentioned in the previous sections.
(93) Two men were taken to hospital after 16 suspected illegal immigrants, believed to be Iraqi
nationals, were found in the back of an " exceptionally hot " lorry. (Evening Standard, 17
June 2017).
(94) The arrival of some 200,000 immigrants a year is relatively uncontroversial; 28.5% of the
population was born abroad. (The Guardian, 21 August 2016).
(95) The evidence is clear: recent waves of immigrants, those who arrived in the UK since 2000
(LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, 31 August 2019)
61
Another discourse which is observed, and which was also present in the pre-referendum period was
the one referring to the struggles of the immigrants and their contributions to their society. There
are plenty of examples referring to cruel conditions immigrants are facing including families’
separation, profiling, violence, and measures which seem to hurt the immigrant communities
among others (Examples 96–98).
(96) tough immigrant law had created a climate of fear in the immigrant community (The
Independent, 29 June 2018)
(97) Accusations of unequal treatment and racial profiling among immigrant communities
have also sparked criticism in Boston about local media attention to Cunningham's arrest.
(BBC News, 22 July 2017)
(98) "But the Americans separate the children from the immigrant parents with complete
maliciousness." (Business Insider, 20 June 2018)
Moreover, there are discourses which show support towards the immigrant communities, or their
contribution to society as noticed in the collocational analysis (Examples 99–101).
(99) In Scotland, we have an ageing population which needs young immigrants to fund our
future pensions. We should be actively supporting and encouraging the 190,000 migrant
workers in Scotland (The National, 1 December 2017)
(100) Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest
President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants
to U.S. business and life. (The Independent, 14 October 2019)
(101) The facts are clear: immigrants contribute greatly to our country 's entrepreneurial spirit
(The Guardian, 2 July 2017).
4.2.2. Migrant
Moving on to the lemma migrant, it is noticeable that in this time period, there is a different set of
collocates. However, some of them have remained (rescued and flow), although they have
increased in frequency. In particular, rescued showed a statistically very significant increase (p-
value = 0.002451892) while the increase of flow was not a statistically significant one (p-value =
62
0.2471006). As mentioned earlier, flow is a water metaphor, which can be used to dehumanize
migrants and since there is an increase, even a non-significant one, it suggests that some negative
discourses have remained.
Rescued, on the other hand, might suggest more positive discourses. Expanding its concordances,
around half of its instances were used also accompanied with a form of quantification which is
usually used to indicate an ever-growing problem, and in this situation, it could create some
sympathy towards migrants but at the same time, migrants seem to be portrayed as a passive group
that needs to be saved, This could come at odds with the definition of migrant since it seems to be
more semantically related to the definition of refugee, which suggests that refugees need to be
saved because they are forced to leave and could be trying to escape persecution in their home
country, and therefore their move is not a result of a thoughtful and well-planned decision.
Out of the different collocates though, caravan is the most frequent one, which is used to indicate
how migrants are being transported around. This also creates a dehumanized image of the migrants,
that of transported goods (Baker, 2006: 81). Similarly, with caravan, carrying has the same
function to dehumanize migrants since they are carried as a type of transported goods.
Central refers to Central American migrants and therefore does not reveal any specific discourses
about migrants, other than the fact they are from Central America. Similarly, African and Honduran
refer to the origin of the migrants. In particular, with regards to Honduran, the majority of
concordances, come from the same article and in fact from the picture label, and therefore, its
significance as a collocate could be contested.
Attended refers to the attending of the annual Migrants Stations of the Cross caravan for migrants'
rights and the majority of its instances (11 out of 13) come for the same article and in particular
from the picture labels and therefore could be regarded as a type of random/seasonal collocate and
therefore not important in the analysis. Annual also refers to the Migrants Stations.
Stranded is referring to migrants stranded in the sea or a country. Examining its concordances,
some of them could be regarded as positive discourses since they highlight the fact that the migrants
need to be rescued while others are regarded as more negative ones since they dehumanize them
as transported goods that need to be carried. (Examples 102–103)
63
(102) Two Italian ships have been dispatched to help rescue more than 600 migrants stranded in
the Mediterranean (Evening Standard, 12 June 2018)
(103) Boat captains may also be arrested and their vessels confiscated for carrying stranded
migrants (The Week, 21 August 2019)
Table 11 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Migrant in the post-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).

1 Caravan 54 1.06
2 Central 54 1.06
3 Rescued 31 0.61
4 African 28 0.55
5 Honduran 24 0.47
6 Carrying 20 0.39
7 Flow 19 0.37
8 Attended 13 0.25
9 Stranded 12 0.24
10. Annual 11 0.22
Examining now the collocates based on frequency only (Table 12), once again, refugees is among
the most frequent ones, which is suggesting the synonymity and interchangeability of the terms.
Number suggests Quantification. In particular, when looking into all the numerical collocates, out
of the 372 instances, 264 are a type of quantification (5.18 in normalized frequency per 10,000
words) which shows an increase from the pre-referendum period (p-value = 0.01025981, very
significant) which is statistically significant.
Border is a collocate that could be categorized under the theme of Entry and which suggests
negative discourses since when expanding its concordance lines, there are discourses of people
being smuggled in the borders (and thus there is a need for border control) and quantification of
migrants crossing the border (Examples 104–105). In general, the need to refer to people crossing
the border shows that the news is preoccupied with issues of (il)legality. However, there are some
discourses which are positive towards migrants since they portray the difficulties they have to face
at the borders, such as being separated from their family members (Example 106).
(104) Funded by the EU, Ethiopia has cracked down on migrant smugglers and intensified border
controls. (Yahoo News UK, 30 October 2019)
64
(105) The number of migrants arrested on the southwest border last month was 98,977, a record
(Reuters UK, 31 May 2019)
(106) his administration's recently halted policy of separating migrant families at the border
(POLITICO.eu, 23 June 2018)
Said is a collocate which was also present in the pre-referendum discourses and was used to refer
to the opinion of officials and in some cases to the opinions of migrants. Similarly, in the post-
referendum period, said is also used to refer to the opinion or quote official authorities such as
International Organization for Migration (IOM) or the U.S. government and in very few cases to
refer to the opinions of migrants which shows once again that they are not properly represented in
the media.
American is referring to Central American while other is used to refer to the other nationalities, to
group them together, and in some cases to also group migrants with refugees, which was also
observed in the pre-referendum period.
Illegal is another collocate which was present in the pre-referendum corpus. However, in this post-
referendum corpus, its frequency has increased (p-value = 0.7814057) although the increase is not
statistically significant. Another collocate suggesting negative discourses are the word crisis, which
depicts the problem as an alarming issue.
Table 12 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Migrant during the post-referendum period (based on frequency).

1 Refugees 115 2.26
2 Border 61 1.20
3 Caravan 54 1.06
4 Central 54 1.06
5 Said 50 0.98
6 Number 45 0.88
7 American 44 0.86
8 Illegal 42 0.82
9 Crisis 38 0.75
10. Other 37 0.73
65
Continuing with the concordance analysis of the lemma, some patterns which were observed during
the collocational analysis are present in the sample of discourses such as Quantification or issues
of Legality (107–109).
(107) More than 200,000 migrants have arrived in Hungary since January (International
Business Times, 7 November 2019)
(108) the destination for most of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have arrived in
Italy in recent years (The Sun, 3 June 2018)
(109) Herrou is charged of helping illegal migrants enter France, travel in France and stay in
France. (Daily Mail, 4 January 2017)
Moreover, as above-mentioned the lemmas migrant and refugee seem to act as synonyms which
were also observed in the concordance analysis. However, there are some discourses which distinct
economic migrants (Example 110). In addition, discourses also observed in the collocational
analysis, which refers to the movement of migrants as elements of nature (waves or flow) or natural
disaster are present (Example 111).
(110) only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities
are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back (The Independent, 25 August 2016)
(111) the head of the UN's International Organisation for Migration (IOM), said the plight of
migrants and refugees should be a focus for leaders gathering in Davos (The Guardian, 14
January 2017)
Furthermore, there are also examples which showed support towards migrants either by highlight
the struggles and abuse they have been receiving (Example 112–113).
(112) The campaign to leave the European Union' encouraged abuse' of migrants and created a'
climate of racism', a group of professors from the University of Bristol claim. (Bristol Post,
4 July 2016)
(113) Migrants warm themselves by a fire in a derelict building in Belgrade (Telegraph, 13
January 2017)
66
4.2.3. Refugee
Continuing with the lemma refugee, the collocate Syrian is still among the most frequent ones
(Table 13) as there are still refugees coming from Syria due to the war. However, its frequency has
significantly decreased (p-value = 1.332268 x 10 -15, highly significant), even though the number
of refugees arriving in the UK from Syria has increased after 2015 (Refugees n.d.)
The second collocate in the list is the word status and is referring to the refugee status, which as
mentioned also in the pre-referendum period, could be perceived to be belonging to the topic of
Legality. The discourses regarding the refugee status seem to have slightly increased (p-value =
0.03978525), which could suggest that after the arrival of refugees in the previous time period, the
discourses are now concerned whether those people have been granted refugee status.
Resettlement and resettle refer to the need to resettle a big number of refugees since, in many
instances, the original place where they landed could not accommodate them all. Resettle was also
present in the pre-referendum corpus. Its frequency in the post-referendum corpus has increased,
although it is not statistically significant (p-value = 0.2650526). However, if the frequency of
resettlement and resettle are counted as one, then there is a statistically highly significant increase
(p-value = 4.534207 x 10 -10). This is in accordance with the number of people being resettled
during that time period. According to UNHCR, the number of resettlements in the UK rose after
2015 (until 2017, after which there is a decline) (see Figure 16).
However, the topic could be regarded as having negative discourses in the sense that this is an ever-
growing problem because the number of resettled refugees arriving in the UK is growing. In
addition, the images of refugees being resettled could be perceived as “transportation of goods”
which according to Baker (2006: 81) is a way to dehumanize the refugees.
67
15
Figure 16 Resettlements in the UK (2013-2019)
Rohingya is referring to the Rohingya refugees and the aftermath of the Rohingya genocide by
Myanmar’s military which took place between October 2016 and January 2017 and again in August
2017 continuing to present (‘Rohingya Genocide’ 2021). Therefore, it should be regarded as a type
of “seasonal collocate” since it refers to that specific event and it does not reveal any specific
discourses for refugees as a whole.
Frayer/Getty as a collocate should be disregarded since it refers to the Getty images and Kevin
Frayer as the source and photographer respectively of the images, the newspapers put in their
articles.
Commissioner is referring to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and
is quoting or expressing his opinions and views on the topic or referring to the agency as an
organization whose purpose is to help refugees and therefore, it could be indicating more positive
discourses. Although a number of those instances are accompanied by the numbers of refugees,
which can create negative connotations as previously suggested (Example 114).
(114) with 98,000 refugees returning in September alone, according to the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (BBC News, 11 October 2016)
15
More info on the data at https://rsq.unhcr.org/en/#NGa9
68
Settlement refers to refugee settlements and therefore belongs to the topic of Accommodation. The
Accommodation topic was also present in the pre-referendum period with the collocate camp which
was more also more frequent compared to settlement here. Considering the rising numbers of
refugees fleeing the war, and in particular the increase of the resettlements in the UK especially in
2016–2017, it is interesting that the frequency of the topic based on this collocate is lower than in
the pre-referendum period. However, as will be examined below, camp is also another collocate
(based on frequency only), and therefore the discourses on Accommodation might not be less but
they might be divided by the use of both camp and settlement instead of using camp only.
Accepting is referring to accepting or in some cases not accepting refugees into the country, which
in that case, the non-accepting policies seem to be faced with criticism and suggest that they could
create more problems (Examples 115–116).
(115) She is worried that if the US were to stop accepting refugees, countries in Europe might
follow suit, especially the ones where politicians there have whipped up similar xenophobic
fears. (The Guardian, 24 November 2016)
(116) And then there have been states that continuously have shown a very cynical and selfish
attitude, not accepting refugees and closing their borders. (Brunel University News, 18
December 2017)
Indefinitely refers to the policy of Donald Trump to indefinitely ban Syrian refugees and suspend
the visas of people from another 6 countries (BBC News 2017). Most of the discourses come from
the beginning of 2017 and therefore, the contribution of the collocate in the overall discourses
regarding refugees could be contested.
Table 13 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Refugee in the post-referendum period (with minimum MI score 3).

1 Syrian 142 2.78
2 Status 84 1.65
3 Resettlement 48 0.94
4 Rohingya 38 0.75
5 Frayer/Getty 24 0.47
6 Commissioner 24 0.47
7 Resettle 20 0.39
8 Settlement 19 0.37
9 Accepting 12 0.24
10. Indefinitely 12 0.24
69
Examining now the collocates based on frequency only, similar patterns with the previous time-
period are present (Table 14). Migrants, asylum, seekers are present in this list of collocates and
their presence suggests the use of those terms interchangeably.
Camp is the 3rd most frequent, again referring to the topic of Accommodation but its frequency is
lower compared to the pre-referendum period, although not statistically significant (p-value =
0.1985124). As above-mentioned, the theme of Accommodation is also expressed through the word
settlement which could perhaps explain the decrease in the use of camp.
Children and child are also present in the post-referendum period, although child in the singular
was not among the 10 most frequent ones in the previous time-period. Nonetheless, it belongs to
the same lemma and if the frequencies of the lemma in the pre-referendum and post-referendum
periods are compared, it seems that the discourses around refugee children have increased and are
statistically significant (p-value = 0.00435443, very significant). As mentioned earlier, usually the
subject of children is less negative since they are a vulnerable group of people who do not make
decisions for themselves. Expanding their concordances lines, most of the discourses refer to the
struggles the refugee children are facing such as being unaccompanied and separated from their
families, unable to attend school, or even being shot dead, which could create the sentiment of
sympathy to the reader of the articles.
Crisis is another collocate which has negative connotations and which was present in the pre-
referendum period. However, in the post-referendum period, there is a slight decrease in its
frequency, although not a statistically significant one (p-value = 0.2825662). However, this might
signify the beginning of a downwards trend.
Similarly with the previous sections said is used, in the majority of the cases, to refer and quote the
opinions of important and official personalities or authorities such as the chief executive of Scottish
Refugee Council or the UNHCR, and in fewer cases to refer to the opinions of the refugees
themselves.
Interestingly, collocates signifying a type of quantification seem to be missing. Once again, in order
to see if there are any numerical collocates which signify a form of quantification, all the numerical
instances were examined. Out of the 417 numerical instances, 245 of them are a type of
quantification related to refugees (4.80 in normalized frequency per 10,000), which shows a
70
statistically significant decrease (p-value = 0.03660583). Of course, there could be other
quantification expressions but the fact that the numerical values are fewer compared to the pre-
referendum period could suggest that there is a downwards trend taking place.
Table 14 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Refugee during the post-referendum period (based on frequency).
N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency 10,000

1 Syrian 142 2.78
2 Migrants 116 2.27
3 Camp 86 1.69
4 Said 86 1.69
5 Asylum 85 1.67
6 Status 84 1.65
7 Children 74 1.45
8 Crisis 64 1.26
9 Child 53 1.04
10. Seekers 50 0.98
Continuing the analysis with the lemma refugee, the analysis reveals that there are still discourses
which seem to quantify the arrival of refugees as well as some discourses which still seem to
indicate that the words migrants and refugees are used as a sort of synonym (Examples 117–118).
(117) The figure represents the highest number of Muslim refugees that have been permitted into
the US (Daily Mail, 25 January 2017).
(118) Maps showing the intricate network of varied routes refugees and migrants have taken to
get to Europe reveal how their paths have come to converge in the search for safety (The
Independent, 2 November 2016)
Moreover, there are also some discourses which mention the dangers the refugees ran away from
as well as the struggles they are facing both during their transport to the host countries as well as
the problems and difficulties they have to endure after they have arrived there:
(119) There have been many reports about Ugandans' warm welcome for South Sudanese fleeing
violence, which may result from memories of being refugees themselves. (LSE Firoz Lalji
Institute for Africa, 3 September 2019)
71
(120) The arrest of a " sadistic " Somali smuggler in Italy has revealed the shocking abuse
suffered by refugees and migrants who are held in squalid camps in the Sahara before
being herded onto boats across the Mediterranean (Telegraph, 18 January 2017)
(121) Just days after 50 migrants and refugees were killed when an airstrike hit a detention centre
in Libya -- with no way to escape -- nearly 100 people have been sent to the exact same
place. (The Independent, 14 July 2019)
In addition, there are discourses which show support towards refugees (Examples 122–123).
(122) Supporters gathered today in solidarity with refugees facing eviction in Glasgow. (Evening
Times, 15 November 2019)
(123) DMU has been chosen for the work it currently does in its local Leicester community
providing support to refugees and people of all abilities and backgrounds across society.
(De Montfort University Leicester, 8 January 2018)
4.2.4. Asylum Seeker
Analyzing the most frequent collocates of the lemma asylum seeker, it is clear that the topic of
Accommodation is still very much prevalent in the discourses regarding asylum seekers as the
words accommodation, housing (as a noun), housing (as a verb) suggest. However, in terms of
frequency, the collocate accommodation, which is present in both sub-periods as one of the ten
most frequent ones, has increased in frequency, although its increase, is not a statistically
significant one (p-value = 0.6208049).
However, the most frequent collocate is the word refugees which once again re-enforces the idea
that those terms are used synonymously. Said is the second most frequent one and it is again used
to quote or refer to the opinions of official authorities or important personalities such as the
manager of the Asylum Seeker Housing Project, the Scottish Government or the Immigration
minister and there are a few concordance lines which refer to the opinions of the asylum seekers
themselves (Examples. 124–126).
72
(124) Sheila Arthur, manager of the Asylum Seeker Housing Project, said: " As far as we are
aware there is nothing in place and we are very stressed about that and current provision,
as there is nothing for women. (Evening Times, 15 November 2019)
(125) The Scottish Government said asylum seekers should be treated fairly and with respect
and would continue to call on the UK Government to make its asylum system more humane.
(Daily Record, 28 July 2018)
(126) " I have suffered so much since I fled Syria, " the asylum seeker said." (The Guardian, 12
November 2017).
Number is one of the collocates suggesting Quantification. In addition, looking into all the
numerical collocate instances of the lemma, out of the 160 numerical instances, 110 is a type of
quantification pattern for the asylum seekers. This shows an increase from the numerical collocates
since the pre-referendum period although not a statistically significant one (p-value = 0.6781231).
Moreover, looking into all the noun collocates, there are other collocates suggesting quantification
even though in smaller frequencies such as hundreds, thousands, numbers, dozen, and hundred
which further re-enforces the Quantification pattern.
Support is referring to organizations offering support to asylum seekers or the asylum seekers
applying for support and therefore, it could be regarded as a positive discourse since it indicates
that they are mechanisms that help asylum seekers. Moreover, when expanding on the concordance
lines, there are some discourses mentioning cuts in the (financial) support of asylum seekers, but
they are met with local support (Examples 127–128).
(127) The government been accused of routinely denying support to asylum seekers, leaving
them homeless and unable to feed their families, following analysis of more than 300 recent
cases. (The Guardian, 9 July 2017).
(128) Advocates and churches vow to fight cuts to asylum seeker support (The Guardian, 27
August 2017)
Government is used to refer to various governments around the world (US, Scottish, German,
Hungarian) and their policies which are either positive (support, give asylum seekers the right to
work) or negative (rejecting asylum seekers, cut off support).
73
Failed is used to refer to failed asylum seekers, that is asylum seekers that have not managed to be
officially accepted in the country and get asylum. Therefore, the collocate could be assigned the
theme of Legality. Examining the concordance lines of the collocate, a significant number of them
is also followed by quantification of some sort. Moreover, some of those discourses are saying that
these numbers of failed asylum seekers are still living illegally in the UK or a big number of them,
even though they should be removed. This type of discourse could be characterized as negative,
not only because the quantification suggests an ever-growing problem but because in some way
they dehumanize those asylum seekers since they are described as a type of object that needs to be
removed.
Destitute is used to refer to the current status of asylum seekers or what their status will be unless
help and support are provided to them. Such a collocate, even though is negative in the sense that
it characterizes the asylum seekers as very poor, it is at the same time a positive discourse towards
them since it could evoke the sympathy of the reader (Examples 129–130).
(129) A spokesman for the Home Office said: " Asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute
are provided with free, furnished accommodation. (Nottingham Post, 5 February 2017)
(130) This feeling was echoed by Councillor Kim Long, who last month led calls from Glasgow
City Council to the Scottish Government to fund emergency housing for destitute asylum
seekers and migrants in the city. (Evening Times, 13 January 2019)
Table 15 Ten most frequent lexical collocates of Asylum Seeker during the post-referendum period (based on frequency).
N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency 10,000

1 Refugees 43 0.84
2 Said 31 0.61
3 Number 29 0.57
4 Accommodation 23 0.45
5 Failed 23 0.45
6 Support 20 0.39
7 Housing 18 0.35
8 Government 18 0.35
9 Destitute 18 0.35
10. Housing 16 0.31
74
Moving on to the concordance analysis of asylum seeker, similar patterns, and topics with those
observed in the collocational analysis appear in the concordance analysis as well. Some of them,
are the topics of Quantification and Legality (Examples 131–134).
(131) The number of asylum seekers in Europe has soared over the past 10 years. (The Guardian,
1 March 2017).
(132) "There are roughly 65.3 million refugees and asylum seekers – but most of these people
are still in the poorest places (Plymouth Herald, 24 June 2016)
(133) More than half failed asylum seekers still remain in the UK illegally, an ex-immigration
chief said (Express, 11 January 2019)
(134) MORE than 50,000 rejected asylum seekers still remain in the UK illegally, according to
the Home Office (Express, 11 January 2019)
Moreover, there are some of the discourses which are more positive since they highlight the
struggles asylum seekers are facing (Examples 135–136).
(135) But interviews with 84 refugees and asylum seekers unearthed claims of rape and assault
at the hand of Nauruan locals, inadequate medical care and cramped, uncomfortable living
conditions. (BBC News, 3 August 2016).
(136) Aman is not the first person I meet who talks about suffering from depression and anxiety.
" They make us think because we are asylum seekers, we are not human, " she says." (The
Guardian, 10 January 2018).
75
5. Discussion
Through the analysis of the results, a few points of remark need to be made. Firstly, as previous
research has suggested (Baker et al. 2008; D. Filmer 2018) all four terms seem to be used in a way
synonymously, although the overlapping of the terms is not at the same level. In particular, migrant
seems to be more of an umbrella term, encompassing the other three. Nonetheless, all four terms
seem to share a few basic themes such as legality, quantification, and their dehumanization which
is either done by portrayed them as a natural disaster of transported goods. In addition, all four
groups rarely have their voices directly heard. Instead, the news sources prefer quoting official
authorities, personalities, and institutions on the topics regarding RASIM.
In terms of numbers, all four lemmas seem to have a fair number of negative discourses which can
be observed through some of their collocates, some of which seem to have decreased (Legality,
Quantification for immigrant and refugee) in the post-referendum period while others have
increased (Quantification for migrant and asylum seeker) Some positive discourses, which were
also observed by Aluthman (2018: 25) which show the contribution of RASIM or their struggles
are present in this study as well and they seem to have been increased, although in some cases,
technical errors by the tool, can make the interpreting of frequencies problematic (duplicate lines
for instance).
Regarding immigrant, in the pre-referendum period, the adjective illegal was the most prominent
one used to characterize those immigrants that were not authorized to stay in the country. However,
in the post-referendum period, its frequency statistically decreased while the use of undocumented
which is less negative increased in frequency. Moreover, discourses which showed more positive
discourses, such as those referring to the contributions of immigrants, showed an increase, although
a number of their instances is a result of technical issues of the tool copying the same image
captioning several times or side stories and therefore makes the interpretation of those frequencies
problematic.
For migrant, in both time periods, there were discourses that showed their synonymity with
refugees and asylum seekers. In addition, while in the pre-referendum period, collocates such as
economic and workers were present in the post-referendum period they are missing, which could
suggest that in the post-referendum period, the term has been used in most cases as an umbrella
76
term for refugees/asylum seekers. This could also explain the increase in the quantification patterns
since after 2015, net migration had decreased while the numbers of people seeking asylum and
especially the number of those being resettled in the UK and elsewhere had increased.
As far as the term refugee is concerned, its Quantification patterns and the Accommodation theme
seem to be decreased. However, this could be a result of the increased use of migrant as a synonym
for refugee as well as the term asylum seeker. However, the topic of Accommodation was not
observed that in the collocates of migrant.
Asylum seekers, on the other hand, seem to present an increase in terms of quantification. This
could be justified by the increased numbers of asylum seekers arriving or being resettled in the UK
after the Syrian war and as already discussed for the case of migrant, its discourses suggest that
these three terms have been used synonymously.
What is interesting in this small-scale research, is that not many of the usual water metaphors that
have been used to describe RASIM (Baker et al. 2008: 287) are present in this corpus (in terms of
collocates), or when they have (flow), their frequencies are rather low. However, as mentioned
earlier, the NOW tool gives very few statistical tools to help the researcher extract collocations,
and therefore if the same corpus was analyzed with different tools, perhaps different patterns and
collocates may have arisen. Nonetheless, as previous research has shown (ibid.: 286), some of the
typical categories of reference used in the discourses of RASIM were observed in this thesis, in
particular the discourses of Quantification which was also observed in other studies as well
(Gabrielatos and Baker 2008: 22).
What is more, since the frequencies of some of the collocates are very low, in order to better
understand the trends and their increase and decrease before and after the referendum, a larger-
scale corpus analysis would need to be carried out, with a much larger corpus, which would perhaps
be containing articles from within larger time frames. For example, in subsequent research, the
following sub-periods might be of interest to be examined (2011-2016 referendum day – post-
referendum day- 2021 or 2001-referendum day – post-referendum day-2031). Of course, it is
expected that after 2020, since the majority of the media have been pre-occupied with the
coronavirus and the traveling of people, including immigrants/migrants, has been more difficult
due to the fact that many countries had their borders closed, perhaps the topic of RASIM is less
77
discussed or it will have to be discussed in relation to covid and therefore it might present very
different discourses than in the past decades.
Moreover, a different tool for the corpus compilation and analysis might prove to be more useful
since the NOW tool presented several technical errors, and its limited analyzing capacity or
statistical categorization of collocate for example can make the analysis of more specialized
corpora problematic and skew the validity of some of the results.
78
6. Conclusion
In conclusion, this thesis studied the topic of RASIM and in particular, a corpus-based critical
discourse analysis of the discourse patterns related to them was attempted. In order to examine the
topic, theoretical background both on corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis studies was
researched as well as the portrayal of RASIM in the media, statistics on the numbers of RASIM,
and the topic of Brexit which was closely related to immigration since it was one of the components
of the Leave Campaign (Vote Leave Campaign, 2016.)
Moreover, the tool used to create and analyze the corpus was briefly presented including its
delimitations which are important to note as they might skew the validity of some of the results of
the analysis and therefore the reader needs to be aware of this when reading the study.
Next, the analysis of the lemmas (immigrant, migrant, refugee, asylum seeker) was made and it
consisted of extracting the main collocates of each lemma in order to discern the most common
patterns and discourses around the topic. Moreover, both the concordances of the collocates and
the concordances of the lemmas were examined and analyzed in order to discover more patterns of
speech and to better understand those already observed.
The analysis of the results indicated that the four terms present similar themes, and in many cases
act as synonyms, which come at odds with their official definitions. The discourses surrounding
RASIM uses themes which negatively reference them and present them for example as an ever-
growing problem or a crisis and thus they were considered as negative. Nonetheless, the struggles
these groups are facing and sometimes their contribution (in the case of immigrant/migrant) and
their need for support (except for the case of immigrant) were mentioned in a number of discourses.
Moreover, comparing the frequencies of some of the collocates in the pre-referendum period with
those in the post-referendum period, decreasing and increasing patterns were observed depending
on the searched lemma which can be explained in some cases (for instance in Quantification or
Accommodation themes) by the official figures of RASIM during those time periods.
Finally, further research of the topic through the use of larger corpora in size and time frames was
suggested as well as their analysis through a more useful corpus analyzing tool, for a better and
more valid analysis of the topic.
79
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UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND

Main subject Level Date Number of pages

Linguistic Data Pro gradu -thesis x 13.08.2021 83 sivua

2.1. Corpus studies and (critical) discourse analysis

2.1.1. Corpora and corpus linguistics

2.1.2. Critical discourse analysis

2.2.1. Collocation analysis

p < 0.05 — the results are significant at the 5% level

2.3. News media and RASIM

2.3.1. Definitions of RASIM

Table 1 Definitions of RASIM

2.3.2. News press and the shaping of opinions

2.3.3. The portrayal of RASIM in the media

However, as KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak (2012) suggest, there is a differentiation

2.3.4. RASIM in numbers

2.4.1. Brexit and immigration

2.4.2. Brexit aftermath and relation with the current thesis

3.2.1. The NOW Corpus

3.2.1.2. Disadvantages of the NOW Corpus

Figure 7 The "Create Corpus" tab of the NOW Corpus.

3.3.1. Analysis of the corpus through the use of collocations

3.3.2. Analysis of the corpus-based on concordance analysis.

6. Search the corpus for more of those patterns.

As above-mentioned, for the analysis of the corpus, a combination of collocational and

4.1. Pre-Referendum period (2013–2016)

4.1.1.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

Figure 10 Information on “Suspected” in the iWeb Corpus.

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.1.1.2. Concordance analysis

4.1.2.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

Figure 11 Concordance lines of the collocate refugee (Migrant, pre-referendum).

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.1.2.2. Concordance analysis

4.1.3.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.1.3.2. Concordance analysis

4.1.4. Asylum Seeker

4.1.4.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.1.4.2. Concordance analysis

As observed at the collocational analysis, themes of Accommodation and especially Quantification

4.2. Post-Referendum Period (2016–2019)

4.2.1.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.2.1.2. Concordance analysis

4.2.2.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

4.2.3.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency per 10,000 words

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency 10,000

4.2.3.2. Concordance analysis

4.2.4. Asylum Seeker

4.2.4.1. Collocational analysis

N/N Collocate Raw Frequency Normalized Frequency 10,000

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