The Journalistic Representations of Saudi Women in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): A Corpus Critical Discourse Analysis

Waheed M A Altohami,Amir H Y Salama

doi:10.5539/ijel.v9n6p320

Waheed M A Altohami, Amir H Y Salama

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n6p320

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Abstract

This paper is a corpus critical discourse analysis of the journalistic representations of Saudi women as they appear in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008). It follows a sociocognitive approach (van Dijk, 2008) to explore the thematic foci discussing issues related to Saudi women and to discuss the discursive strategies implemented to propagate such issues. The study has reached four findings. First, the thematic foci related to Saudi women are textually and referentially coherent as they were meant to provide a grand narrative underlying a specific context model. Second, Saudi women are negatively represented as no social roles are ascribed to them throughout the corpus. Third, different social actors are also represented alongside Saudi women to put them in a wider socio-cultural context to aggravate their problems. Finally, the most effective discursive strategies which mediated the running context model included victimization, categorization, stereotyping, normalization, and exaggeration.

Highlights

Language is a social phenomenon mostly studied in social, historical, political and cultural contexts
Since the present study focuses on the journalistic representations of Saudi women, data is limited to the news section which includes around 114 million words collected from 10 American newspapers
Having analyzed the concordance lines in which SAUDI WOMEN and its co-referential keywords are used, it can be argued that the sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis is methodologically effective in revealing the ideological stances shaping gender and power relations in Saudi Arabia

Summary

Introduction

Language is a social phenomenon mostly studied in social, historical, political and cultural contexts. Context refers to the background of some state of affairs expressed by a discourse type whose structure, style and content are influenced . Discourse is both constituent and constitutive of its context, and the properties of a context can be inferred from variation in discourse Discourse in general and journalistic discourse in particular shapes the public opinion, frames common ideologies and records social practices at a given time. News report schemata in the press have a special context that places events in their political, social or historical contexts (van Dijk, 1988)

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