DISCOURSE AND MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA: A STUDY OF SELF-OTHER CHARACTERIZATIONS AND SEMANTIC AMBIGUITY

This paper explores how SELF and OTHER are characterized in the Russian migration discourse in the autumn of 2006 and searches for some possible linguistic sources of vagueness with regard to the highlighted semantic attributes of discourse referents. Specifically, it investigates the role played by semantically ambiguous expressions used especially in pro-governmental media. The frequency of characterizations of SELF-OTHER discourse referents in Moderate and Radical corpus is calculated on the basis of a specifically compiled taxonomy. The study demonstrates that a considerable number of characterizations for SELF and OTHER in Moderate corpus are ambiguous with regard to the semantic attributes highlighted in such characterizations. The results imply that semantic ambiguity can be used strategically by the governmental groups to convey the ideology of ethnicism towards migration. However, it is possible to partially resolve such semantic ambiguity using specific heuristics suggested in this paper. 1. Migration Discourse in Russia in 2006 Migration Discourse in the Russian Federation in the second half of 2006 can be characterized by prolific media reporting which appeared due to the following major events. First of all, interethnic riots in the small Karelian town of Kondopoga, which started at the end of August 2006, resulted in a vigorous discussion in the Russian media on the issue of migration, self and migrant identities and interethnic relations. Secondly, a Russian-Georgian crisis broke out at the end of September-beginning of October 2006. It had major repercussions not only at the intergovernmental level, but also at the level of security or, rather, an alleged lack of security arising from a large number of Georgians or кавказцы ‘Caucasians’ on the Russian territory. Finally, a governmental act was issued in November 2006 setting out limits for the visas issued to foreigners as well as introducing working restrictions for migrants which represented a legislative outcome of the first two events. Apart from that, a vivid discussion was launched by the Russian media with regard to the governmental resettlement project of the so-called соотечественники ‘fellow nationals’. The meaning of this expression was entirely negotiated by the participants of discourse. Both governmental and right-wing groups participated in the opinions exchange on the aforementioned events. The amount of publications discussing migration, migrants, the Russian people, “foreigners”, “fellow nationals” and non-Russian in general soared. A notable discourse analytic line in the research on migration discourse in 2006 was taken by Kozhevnikova (2007). One of the important changes to instances of what was classified as hate language became the “ethnization” of concepts previously not laden with ethnic content, such as ‘migrant’, ‘citizen of . ’, ‘native of. ’. According to Kozhevnikova (2007), the word ‘migrant’ became fully void of its social connotation and obtained exclusively “ethnic” overtones. Having analised the instances for “objects of hate language” 1 , Kozhevnikova summed up the results which are presented in the table below: 1 This paper classifies such objects of hate language as OTHER discourse referents. 1 C R C E E S W or ki ng P ap er S er ie s. W or kin -p ro gr es s, p le as e do n ot c ite w ith ou t t he p er m is si on o f t he a ut ho r. September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 Total Generally ethnic xenophobia 23 33 21 19 96 Caucasians as a whole 54 18 9 11 92 Other people from the region of the Caucasus 7 58 15 4 84 Chechens 39 13 13 4 67 Migrants 17 23 11 13 64 Table 1. Major objects of hate language Kozhevnikova (2007) acknowledges that hate language is becoming more indirect, symbolic and rhetorically sophisticated and that the mass media choose to allude to cultural stereotypes. She also recognized that the currently used methodology of monitoring cannot account for such changes and has to be substantially modified for use in the future. Preliminary analysis of the corpus of articles on migration that I collected during late August 2006 to mid-Nov 2006 demonstrated that the characterizations such as гражданин . , мигрант etc. cannot be classified as ethnonyms out of hand. I am going to prove in this paper that depending on the type of discourse and communicative intentions of interlocutors characterizations can be classified as either ethnonyms, politonyms, demonyms or just remain unresolved with regard to the semantic attributes highlighted in the characterization in a specific text or text abstract. This linguistic phenomenon will be referred to as semantic ambiguity and it will be discussed in Section 2. Section 3 describes the data and methodology selected for the analysis of this data. Section 4 gives the results of the study including statistical results and it finishes with a discussion. 2. Semantic Ambiguity in Linguistics and Migration Discourse Amongst a variety of approaches to lexical meaning, this paper espouses a cognitive semantic view that lexical meaning is conceptual and it corresponds with a concept held in the mind of the interlocutor and such concept is based on subjective and sensory experience. While traditional semantics sees semantic ambiguity as involving two lexemes (cf. Lyons 1977), cognitive semantics identifies various degrees of salience or entrenchment with regards to multiplicity of meanings (cf. Tuggy 1993). According to Tuggy (1993), various senses are constructed on the basis of a schema and its elaborations and they exist to the degree that they are established (entrenched) in speakers’ minds through repeated usage. It can be illustrated in the following figure: