Collocational Patterns and Semantic Prosodies of “Saudization” in Modern Standard Arabic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Since its intensification in the early 2000s, Saudization, perceived as Saudi Arabia’s labor nationalization policy, has profoundly shaped the socio-economic and socio-political discourse in the Arab world. In spite of the extensive policy and economic research on Saudization, it remains linguistically underexplored, particularly through corpus-based analysis of Arabic language discourse. The current study, hence, investigates the collocational patterns of the term “Sa’wadah” (the transliterated Arabic language equivalent of “Saudization”) in a mega-corpus of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with the aim of sketching its semantic prosodies and working towards the ideological representations permeating through its collocates. To this end, using the methodological synergy of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, the Arabic corpus (arTenTen24) integrated within the online interface of Sketch Engine is scrutinized to extract a statistically significant collocational profile for Saudization and work out its semantic prosodies and their ideological representations. The findings show that the collocational profile of Saudization can be categorized into institutional, economic and evaluative topic domains. Second, the semantic prosodies associated with the term are mainly mixed, with a slight tendency towards negative and critical evaluation. Third, the ideological representations of Saudizations in MSA discourse are marked by ambivalence: the policy is constructed as a national duty whose implementation is a contested practice.