Immigrant in the Light of Language Production

In this paper, we propose to study the semantic development of the term immigrant in Croatian based on newspaper articles published in the online version of the Croatian newspaper Jutrarnji list from 30 August 2015 to 17 January 2023. Our analysis is based on the approach of the Semantics of Argumentative Possibilities initiated by Galatanu [1], who stated that in the core meaning of every lexical term exists a possibility for deployment of meaning caused by the contextual environment. According to that, the core meaning of the word immigrant is calculated based on the lexical definition in the Croatian language. To test the environment of the keyword as the first step in constructing the network of contextual appearances of collocates and other appreciative elements, which can lead us towards the new semantic deployment of the key term, we developed a NooJ syntactic grammar. NooJ located occurrences of the key term and its partial synonyms, enabling us to select our key term’s precise meaning. It also showed the immediate collocates of the term. We noticed that the grammar needed some improvement, considering the choice of prepositions in the syntactic grammar branches. However, that is operable, and can be used on larger corpora for further and more thorough analysis.