1. A CDA Analysis of English-language Arab Newspaper Discourse
Hakam 2007 1
The 'Cartoons Controversy'
A CDA Analysis of English-language Arab Newspaper
Discourse
Submitted for the degree of MA in
English Linguistics
University of Central England
June 2007
Supervising tutor: Dr. Ruth Page
Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate how English-language Arab newspapers
articulate the ideological alignment they represent, and how they reproduce, resist
and/or challenge the discourse that stems from a dominant Western/European culture.
The study focuses on 'hard' news texts in the form of news reports, analyses and
opinion pieces that address the events and issues that came to be known as the
'Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy'. The data sample is a corpus of 422 such
texts gathered from nineteen 'serious' English-language Arab newspapers. The
analysis of the data is approached via the contextual linguistic paradigm of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA). Models of discourse are selected that seem suitable for
the purposes of the investigation. The main theme of the theoretical framework is
Fairclough's (2001) view of conflicting ideologies in discourse as symptomatic of
social conflict. An important model in this study is based on a concept called 'signals
of affiliation' (Mills 1995), which is adapted specifically to the context and process of
Arab newspaper discourse production. The first part of the investigation is a
computer-assisted quantitative frequency and concordance analysis of the entire
corpus, supplemented by qualitative comparisons of a large representative subset of
headlines and lead sentences. Part Two of the analysis consists of detailed CDA
microanalysis of two full texts: the first is attributed to a Western source; the second
is an Arab-generated text. The study concludes with a critique of the CDA models
and theories implemented herein, a discussion of the most salient findings, and some
considerations for further study and the possible future role of CDA in the educational
system.