Semantic Change, Intersubjectivity and Social Knowledge in The Sydney Morning Herald

As Salikoko Mufwene contends, all language ecologies consist of a large pool of features and linguistic options to choose from (Mufwene 2001). Yet in post-colonial societies, selecting from language ecology pools entails that speakers constantly redefine and express a social linguistic identity, an alignment with other individuals and an accommodation of speech behaviour. In particular, lexical semantic shift in Australian varieties of English can be analysed in relation to change in culture/society related to Indigenous sovereignty issues: cultural factors and historical events have given rise to highly unpredictable semantic changes. The paper will analyse two corpora of articles from the Australian newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and Koori Mail, based on the years 2000 and 2008, which have been pivotal in the definition of the Australian National Apology to Indigenous peoples, through the tools of discourse analysis.