A Pragma-Discoursal Study of News Conflict in Arabic Media

Abstract

News Conflict is an old-new topic that has been scrutinized and studied from different angles. Yet, no attempt of a comprehensive pragma- discoursal treatment or analysis of the pragmatic elements of news discourse has been spotted. Thus, this work concerns itself with the attempt of designing a rather comprehensive pragma-discoursal approach to investigate News Conflict. This incorporates investigating the most observable pragma-discoursal means employed by two ideologically contradicting news channels, namely, Al-Jazeera and Al-Ittijah Satellite Channels in viewing news and events; identifying the major pragma-discoursal devices exploited by Al-Jazeera and Al-Ittijah Satellite Channels for achieving their ideologically-contradicting aims. In light of these aims the study hypothesizes that Foregrounded Themes, Modality, Lexical Cohesion, Collocation and Pragma-rhetorical Tropes are the most readily observable Collocation and Foregrounding are the major processes manifested in presenting news and events that are used by both channels under investigation