Radical Islamists in the New York Times : a critical discourse analysis study

Abstract EN

The current study is carried out in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) for the analysis of articles taken from New York Times (henceforth NYC), as a representative for American media.

The study rises the following questions: (1) How radical Islamists groups are tackled linguistically in the discourse of American newspapers? (2) Which type of modality is used heavily to reflect the ideologies of American newspapers? (3) Do American newspapers rely on a specific trigger in the production of news? (4) Do American newspapers consider radical Muslims as if they were representative for Islam or not? The study aims at: (1) Analyzing linguistically the discourse of newspapers to know what is the role of the American writers in the reproduction of racism, and discrimination in their discourse.

(2) Examining the role of modality in presenting issues related to radical Islamists.

(3) Finding out which presupposition trigger is used mostly in American newspapers.

(4) Explaining the western view to Islam and Muslims.

To achieve the aims of this study the following procedures are presented: (1) presenting a brief review about CDA and Radical Islamists.

(2) Discussing the model used.

(3) Analyzing the articles following van Dijk Dijk‟s “News discourse” (1988) which is taken to handle the linguistic level of the study.

Concerning the ideological level, van Dijk „s “Ideological Square” (1995b) is used.

The study also uses Yule‟s (1996) for the analysis of presupposition triggers.