The Linguistic and Pragmatic Aspects in Selected Native and Non-Native English Editorials: A Corpus Study

Abstract

This dissertation is a corpus-based study of some semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features in The New York Times and Al-Ahram weekly editorials in the depiction of the Syrian and Palestinian conflict in 2015. The semantic analysis is carried out focusing on global meaning and describing various actors. Besides, the syntactic and pragmatic analysis focus on analyzing modality, the use of pronouns, and passivization, in addition to speech acts. It aims at digging deep quantitatively and qualitatively into the analysis of newspaper's ideologies. The quantitative analysis is accomplished using AntConc 3.4.4 Software to find out the most frequent lexical items and the dominant syntactic patterns. Subsequently, elucidations and explanations of these results are done qualitatively using the framework of the socio-cognitive approach of Van Dijk (2000) and the speech acts introduced by John Searle (1979). Throughout the analysis, special consideration is devoted to how the use of these linguistic choices, by newspapers writers, reveals hidden ideologies in the examination of Middle East Politics.