Not ready for democracy: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the representation of majorities in Arabic media narratives

This paper combines corpus linguistics (CL) techniques and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore how the majority of people are represented in media discourse. Some CL techniques and statistical tests are used to identify the linguistic patterns for representing the majority in Arabic discourse quantitatively and qualitatively. Wodak’s discursive strategies and Van Leeuwen’s representation strategies of social actors are used to complement the quantitative findings and capture these discursive strategies in a large Arabic corpus, arTenTen. CL techniques are used to analyze lexical items related to ‘majority’. The statistically significant words co-occurring with the search term provide insights into how majorities are represented. Findings indicate that the collocates and the contextual use of the term ‘majority’ tend to carry negative connotations, implicitly underestimating majorities. For instance, verbs describing the actions exercised by majorities are predominantly negated, indicating restraints on their agency. Findings also show how the mental image about the majority is constructed differently between those in power and ordinary people.