Two approaches to differentiation of migration research terms (based on corpus analysis data)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25178/nit.2025.4.8Keywords:
corpus linguistics; migration discourse; semantic category; collocation; migration; migration termAbstract
The article presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of English-language terms related to the study of migration. The sources used were research articles in the social sciences published between 2018 and 2020 in international first-quartile journals indexed in the Scopus database. The corpus-linguistic study addresses two objectives: to identify functioning systems of terms in scientific articles and to describe their disciplinary affiliation based on the criteria of semantic fields. A corpus of texts amounting to approximately 280,000 words was compiled and processed using the concordance and keyword list functions of the AntConc software. Within the texts, two-word combinations containing the units migration and migrant(s) were identified. The qualitative analysis of the semantics of these units served as an additional verification of their semantic differentiation.
The results of the study indicate that, from the perspective of semantic analysis of terms, two approaches to the study of migration are currently emerging: first, a time-oriented approach, and second, a subject-oriented approach within specific disciplines.
The analysis further establishes that the field of migration studies is structured, on the one hand, around the study of communities or individual experience, and on the other, around temporal or subject-based approaches, which often intersect. It was also found that established terminology is characteristic of economics, education, and public administration, while fields such as history, geography, and psychology have yet to develop their own consistent conceptual frameworks for this phenomenon.
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For citation:
Permyakova T. M. and Smirnova E. A. Two approaches to differentiation of migration research terms (based on corpus analysis data). New Research of Tuva, 2025, no. 4, pp. 122-136. (In Russ.). DOI: https://doi.org/10.25178/nit.2025.4.8
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Author Biographies
Tatiana M. Permyakova, HSE University
Doctor of Philology, Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, HSE University.
Postal address: 38 Studencheskaya St., 614070, Russia, Perm.
E-mail: tpermayakova@hse.ru
Elizaveta A. Smirnova, HSE University
Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, HSE University.
Postal address: 38 Studencheskaya St., 614070, Russia, Perm.
E-mail: easmirnova@hse.ru
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