Lexico-schematic analysis of the representation of political protests in ُEgypt in the new york times and ahramonline

Abstract EN

This study aims at conducting a contrastive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the representation of the protests that took place in Egypt after late President Mohamed Morsi's November 2012 Constitutional Declaration, as reported by the U.S.

The New York Times and Egyptian Ahramonline electronic newspapers.

The significance of this research resides in the fact that, despite the elapse of about a decade on such watershed event, it has hitherto paid no linguistic attention.

Discussion will draw on Critical Discourse Analysis, particularly Fairclough's (1995a) Discourse Analysis Model, and van Dijk's (1988) notion of News Schemata.

We explore the similarities/differences in the representation of the event in the electronic newspapers both lexically and schematically with the aim of describing the function of language as a powerful socio-political practice in media discourse.

The textual and discursive structure of 48 news reports were compared and related to the political and social context of the events to exhibit the newspapers' ideological strategies through various linguistic choices.

The findings of the study exhibited more similarities than differences between the two newspapers.

Up to 11 ideological strategies were detected in the analysis.