A Corpus–assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Exclusion Strategies in Political Newspaper Articles: The March of Return in Gaza

Abstract

This study examines if there is a favored linguistic exclusion strategy in Arabic and English newspaper articles reporting on the March of Return in Gaza and explores their potential impacts on the readers' minds. Ten newspaper articles were collected; five articles are in Arabic, each is from a different Arab country, while the others are the top-selling five newspapers in the UK. Data were analyzed by observing the linguistic structures and the representations of social actors from the CDA perspective adopted by Theo van Leeuwen and using two built corpora to calculate the frequencies of the exclusion linguistic structures found. The findings showed that Arabic and English newspaper articles used linguistic exclusion strategies differently to serve specific functions, such as: excluding the social actors involved in the case of the March of Return in Gaza, driving the reader's attention to the other social actor to view him as a victim or the party who abuses power, hiding or protecting the excluded social actor or driving the reader's attention to the event rather than the action.