The influence of audience on the topics discussed by King Abdullah II of Jordan: a corpus-assisted discourse study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Presidential speeches are among the best ways to demonstrate heads of state’s competence in dealing publically with domestic as well as foreign issues, and thus contribute to their political survival. This study uses a new one-million-word parallel corpus of Arabic and English to investigate the political topics that King Abdullah II of Jordan discusses when using the Arabic language to address Jordanian or Arab audiences and when using the English language to address Western/international audiences. The corpus covers the period from 1999 to 2015. Using Wordsmith 7 and examining the most frequent 25 Arabic and English words, we found that King Abdullah tends to discuss particular issues on all occasions, locally, nationally, and globally. These include Arab and regional matters as well as the peace process in the Middle East. It is also found that local themes that are mainly associated with Jordan, its political system, and economic and social challenges were more frequent in the Arabic corpus when compared to its English counterpart. However, Jordan’s involvement in some issues in the Middle East, especially in Palestine and Iraq, was more important in the English texts. The study concludes that parallel corpora can be a rich resource for discourse studies.