The topoi of Mandela's death in the Arabic speaking media: A corpus-based political discourse analysis

Abstract

The present study attempts a political discourse analysis of a spoken Arabic corpus on the death of Nelson Mandela. The corpus mainly consists of the coverage of some Arabic-speaking TV channels that was broadcasted in the aftermath of the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013. The discourse-historical approach was employed with a view to finding out the various topoi and ideologies deployed in the corpus. For this purpose, the spoken corpus used in this study was first transcribed using EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN), a transcription tool for multimodal texts. Afterward, the corpus was compiled using Sketch Engine to enable researchers to process the data automatically and hence to use different computational tools that can assist in finding the various topoi. A computational analysis using collocations, wordlists, N-grams, and concordance features can provide a more precise analysis of the various topoi in context and hence to uncover the ideologies of participants/politicians.