Ideological Representation of ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ in Post-9/11 Narrative Discourse in British Newspapers

Abstract

The general aim of this article is to examine the ways in which British newspapers in their editorials represent ‘self’ and ‘other’ in the backdrop of the discourse on the ‘war on terror’. The central argument of this paper is that The Guardian and The Times in their editorials on the ‘war on terror’ portray the ‘other’ in a highly stereotypical and negative
manner and both portray the ‘self’ in a highly celebrated fashion, while retaining subtle nuances and differences. The findings show the creation of two ‘others’ by The Guardian (an American other and an Islamic other) and two ‘selves’ by The Times (a British self and an American self). Corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CL-based CDA) has been applied to analyse the data. The theoretical framework is derived from van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square, which comprises semantic macro-strategies that provide binary features for positive self-presentation and negative other presentation. This approach accentuates a positive ‘us’ and de-emphasises a positive ‘them’; likewise, it emphasises a negative ‘them’ and de-emphasises a negative ‘us’. A special corpus was developed by retrieving all the leading articles/editorials/opinion-editorials about the ‘war on terror’ from two British broadsheets: The Guardian (TG-corpus) and The Times (TT-corpus), spreading over the time period from 11 September 2001 to 31 December
2011. The editorial texts were retrieved through ‘ProQuest’ and ‘Lexis/Nexis’ online repositories/databases. Corpus annotation and statistical analyses were conducted by using WMatrix, Sketch Engine and Wordsmith Tools software and web portals. Both corpora were tagged semantically and grammatically, using USAS and CLAWS from the
University of Lancaster’s platform.

Keywords: Critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, ideology, self, other, war on terror, media discourse