A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Event of September 11, 2001 in American and Syrian Print Media Discourse

Abstract

Aiming at highlighting the important role of print media discourse in the implicit transfer of the dominant ideology of discourse context, the present data-driven paper demonstrates how the lexical features of repetition and synonymy as well as the structural and thematic features of passivization, nominalization and predicated theme were utilized by the discourse producers to mediate between their own underlying ideology and the target readers' understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Through a comparative statistical analysis of the print media discourse of the data for the study written in two ideologically opposing contexts of Syria and America, we have tried to explicate how the discourse producers utilized various lexical and thematic strategies to produce different impressions of the event and implicitly impose the underlying ideology on the readers.