The 'cartoons controversy': a Critical Discourse Analysis of English-language Arab newspaper discourse

This study is unique in two ways: 1) it explores the little-known discourse site of English-language Arab newspapers; and 2) it applies quantitative methods to a large amount of data to uncover patterns that show how these newspapers reproduce, resist and/or challenge the discourse that stems from a dominant Euro-centered culture. The article focuses on a corpus of 422 'hard' news texts that address the events and issues known as the 'Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy'. The analysis of the data is approached via the contextual linguistic paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). An important model in this study is derived from Mills' (1995) concept of 'signals of affiliation' which is here adapted specifically to the context of Arab newspaper discourse production. Central to the investigation is a computer-assisted quantitative frequency and concordance analysis of the corpus.