Lexical Collocation as Linguistic Representation of Xenophobia Crisis in South African's Print and Online Media
Recent years have seen an increase in the intensity of xenophobia in South Africa, with a corresponding increase in the discourse surrounding the crisis. Therefore, this paper seeks to investigate ideas, views and communicative intentions that the linguistic resource of lexical collocation is deployed to represent in South African print and online media discourse on xenophobia. To this end, the paper examined occurrences, patterns and usage of lexical collocation in South African print and online media. Data were drawn from four print and online newspapers in South Africa between 2015 – 2019, namely, Daily Sun, the Citizen, News24 and Daily Dispatch. Situated within the theory of systemic functional linguistics, the study utilised the conceptual framework of lexical collocation as an analytical tool. Analysis revealed that lexical collocations were used to represent pungent views, dispositions, emotions and attitudes of contributors to the discourse of xenophobia in South Africa. The study identified four themes in which the patterns of the deployment of lexical collocation converged and these are “the social identity of the perpetrators of xenophobic acts,” “forms of xenophobic acts,” “conceptual descriptions of xenophobic violence,” and “forms of non-violent xenophobic acts.” The findings showed that lexical collocation is a succinct linguistic mechanism through which writers enact and reinforce their worldviews and communicative intentions. The study concludes that the findings in the study can serve as a tool for informing public policy toward solving the problem of the xenophobia crisis in SouthAfrica.
Keywords: