Investigating recurrent themes and semantic fields in news reports on the grand Ethiopian renaissance dam: a corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract EN

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), under construction since 2011, is a source of political tension between Ethiopia and Egypt.

This study investigates the major recurrent themes and semantic fields occurring in the Egyptian and Ethiopian news media representation of the issues raised by the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

The objective of the study is to compare and contrast the ideological implications reflected in the Egyptian and Ethiopian news discourse on the controversy surrounding the GERD.

The analysis uses the tools of Corpus Linguistics (CL) within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), adopting Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional model of CDA.

The method of analysis relies on conducting two corpus linguistic procedures, namely, keywords and concordances.

The data under investigation consist of two specialized corpora of online news reports written in English and published in the period between 2013 to 2020.

The findings of the corpus analysis reveal the impact of ideological and political stance on the representation and interpretation of the issues concerning the GERD in the news media.