Abstract
This paper explores Edward Said’s journalistic collocations as a discursive practice of the social actors that Said frequently referred to in Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper. Towards this end, a corpus-based approach has been utilized in a methodological synergy that combines the corpus techniques of extracting keywords and calculating collocations as well as the qualitative method of analysing social-actor representations (Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008). The data used for analysis comprise a corpus of virtually all the articles written by Said in Al-Ahram Weekly from 1998 till 2003. The corpus is 105,031words and has been electronically manipulated by the corpus software tools of Wmatrix (Rayson, 2003) and WordSmith (Scott, 2012). The paper has reached three findings. First, Said’s journalistic discourse in Al-Ahram Weekly revolves around 38 social-actor keywords that reflect his thematic foci all through the time span he was writing articles for the newspaper. Second, of all these keywords, only twelve node words have been identified to associate with peculiar collocates; the node words were divided into (1) nominations of political personas and (2) genericizations with various discourse functions. Third, Said’s peculiar collocations reflected his ideological orientations towards certain political personas and specific topics in his journalistic discourse.
Highlights
The Palestinian-American critic and academic Edward Said (1935–2003) has been celebrated worldwide for his style of writing, be it academic or journalistic
This paper explores Edward Said’s journalistic collocations as a discursive practice of the social actors that Said frequently referred to in Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper
The first stage runs through two phases: (i) the computational identification of the keywords appearing in Said’s specialized corpus as compared against the BNC Sampler Written; these keywords have been determined based on their status as social actors in Said’s journalistic discourse; (ii) the calculation of both strong and significant collocates of the relevant keywords, presented as node words, by means of the collocation statistics offered by Wmatrix, viz. mutual information (MI) score of 3 or higher and t-score of 2 or higher
Summary
The Palestinian-American critic and academic Edward Said (1935–2003) has been celebrated worldwide for his style of writing, be it academic or journalistic. The term has been investigated from various approaches One of those early approaches has been influenced by the psychological aspect of collocability, with a focus on the “collocative meaning” as comprising the typical associations of lexical items (co-)occurring in their environments Rather than being restricted to investigating the general language of newspapers—topically or thematically—by means of corpus-based methods, the present context of research attempts to reveal the journalistic ideology of a certain professional writer, that is, Edward Said. The current study hypothesizes that using the corpus techniques of extracting keywords, calculating their peculiar collocates, and concordancing as well as the discourse approach of social-actor representations can reflect the ideological stance adopted by Edward Said in his journalistic writings in Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper.
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