Labelled glossaries in the context of migration: a proposal for Italian and English

Abstract

This paper investigates the way in which the words used to talk about migration are described by international organisations and public administrations. It proposes a more detailed description of the words that takes into account the morphological characteristics of each word, starting from corpora drawn from the Italian version of the EMN Glossary on Asylum and Migration and the English version of the IOM Glossary on Migration. The study introduces original excerpts of morphologically labelled glossaries comprising of the most frequent words in the migration context. The labelled glossaries present the description of the word units and an explanation of their grammatical behaviours, using tools and techniques from the Lexicon-Grammar theory to account for words’ features usually considered as mere irregularities. The addition of these morphological labels to describe the behaviour of the words in the context of migration would allow them to be used with confidence by speakers, even those whose first language is not that of the country in which they find themselves, thus putting the individual at the core of the issue by giving those most effected the power to voice their opinions.