The Representation of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in American and British Electronic Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

The synergy between Critical Discourse Analysis tool and Corpus Linguistic analysis are applied in this study to explore the representation of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in American and British electronic newspapers. The researcher investigates the representation by applying lexical choice and AntConc software. The main source of the present study is taken from online newspapers, the section of world news stories. The data is collected from various dates randomly to find out the representation of the West towards ISIS. The news is collected from "The Independent" and "The Guardian" which are British online newspapers and "The New York Times", and "The Washington Post" which are American online newspapers. The data consists of online world news stories published on the official websites of "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Guardian" and "The Independent". The thesis analyzes forty news stories; 7 articles from The New York Times, 9 articles from The Washington Post, 10 articles from The Guardian and 14 articles from The Independent as they should be approximately equal in number of word tokens. Each of the chosen online newspapers is from June 2014 to October 2014 as in this period ISIS starts to perform actions that grab the attention of media. The researcher starts by saving the articles from the websites of these newspapers, then a corpus linguistic tool is used. Finally, the researcher applies a CDA tool which is lexical choices.