Ideological Collocation in Meta-Wahhabi Discourse Post-911 : A Symbiosis of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.

Salama, Amir Hamza Youssef (2011) Ideological Collocation in Meta-Wahhabi Discourse Post-911 : A Symbiosis of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis attempts to answer the following overarching question: How has Wahhabi Islam been ideologically recontextualized across post-9/11 opposing discourses via collocation? Drawing on a methodological synergy of corpus linguistics and CDA (Baker et al. 2008; Salama 2011), I propose a linguistic model for explicating the ideological nature of collocation between two clashing books: Stephen Schwartz's (2002) The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror and Natana DeLong-Bas's (2004) Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. The two books, produced post-9/11, take diametrically opposing stances towards the same socio-religious practice of Wahhabi Islam/Wahhabism. First, using WorSmith5, keywords were used to identify the different semantic foci in the two texts, along with their relevant 'macropropositions' (Van Dijk 1980, 1995, 2009b). A small number of keywords were selected for further analysis, and their functions in contributing towards ideologies were investigated by examining their collocates, relying on the concepts of textual synonymy, oppositional paradigms and argumentative fallacies. Second, the meta-Wahhabi discourses underlying the two texts are analysed by focusing on the discourse processes of producing, interpreting and explaining the patterns of collocations in the texts. Contextual information, such as relevant biographical information relating to the text producers, was taken into account. Additionally, a socio-cognitive approach was used to consider ideological coherence and socio-religious schemas which motivated the ideological use of collocations in both texts. Finally, from a social-semiotic perspective, interdiscursive meanings and the symbolic power invested with the collocating words as religious or political signs are queried. The findings offered in the present thesis cover methodological and theoretical aspects. First, on a theoretical level, there are findings that relate to how collocation as a micro textual resource can closely interface with other macro discourse and language processes, e. g. ideology, (social) cognition, semiotics and interdiscursivity. Second, on a methodological level, this study has contributed to the presently well-established 'methodological synergy' of corpus linguistics and CDA in a symbiotic fashion. This can be recognized in two respects: 1) compared to pure CDA research, the methodological procedure followed in this study (which goes from the quantitative to the qualitative methods) renders the identification of the linguistic phenomenon - collocation - studied in this research far less subjectively identified; 2) the possibility of contextualizing the keywords extracted from one text by conducting a macropropositional analysis (i. e. identifying the topics and themes) in this text.