Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Risk, Corpora, and Discourse: The Construction of Risks to Life in News Media(Lancaster University, 2024-03-28) Alibri, Rakan; Baker, PaulThis thesis investigates the language of risk reporting, more precisely how ten British newspapers use language to discursively construct four “risks to life”: terror attacks, earthquakes, road accidents, and heart attacks. The media do not allot space to these risks equally or in accordance with risk level (i.e., based on number of deaths and likelihood of occurrence). In addition to the media, public perception of risk in the second half of the 20th century was noteworthy for accepting serious everyday risks (i.e., those causing a high number of deaths) while rejecting new low-level technological risks (Zinn & Taylor-Gooby, 2006). The approach of this thesis comprises theories and methodologies from Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and corpus linguistics. The interdisciplinarity nature of CDS facilitates drawing upon theoretical frameworks from media and risk studies. News values, which play a role in news story selection, identify the newsworthiness of the risks, while risk characteristics, qualities found to influence public risk perception by the psychometric paradigm, enhance the interpretation of risk construction and how that might influence the public perception. The data comprise approximately 14 million tokens of news articles distributed unevenly between four corpora but from identical sources and timeframes (January 2017 to January 2020). The analysis focuses on three aspects: risks to life (events), related social actors, and consequences (i.e., death). It also identifies news values and risk characteristics around these aspects. The findings highlight discursive strategies in risk reporting: dramatisation and naturalisation, (im)personalisation, blame / responsibility, and risk management. These contribute differently to the construction of the risks to life and can potentially be linked to how media amplify or attenuate risks in society, a consequence of media language use. I conclude with their manifestation in reporting the risks to life and how they might be linguistically and discursively realised.9 0Item Restricted False News Discourse Online: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analyses(University of Birmingham, 2024-05) Baissa, Bashayer; Fuoli, Matteo; Grieve, JackThis thesis examines the discourse characteristics of online false news articles using a mixed-method corpus-assisted discourse approach. The study employs three corpus-assisted analytical methods: move analysis (MA), key semantic domains analysis (KSDA), and multidimensional analysis (MDA) to analyse online false news articles in terms of discourse structure, discursive news values, and stylistic patterns respectively, with the goal of understanding how false news influences its audience. The corpus includes 137 verifiably online false news articles (totalling 106,673 words) on climate change, vaccination, and COVID-19. It also includes a comparative corpus consisting of 548 news articles (totalling 350,798 words) from reliable and reputable broadsheets, tabloids, web-based publications, and blogs covering the same topics. The MA findings indicate that the primary goal of false news articles is challenging mainstream narratives. This aim is reflected in the discourse structure of false news articles, which combines elements of expository, narrative, and argumentative genres. The KSDA uncovers that false news discourse emphasises meanings constructing unique news values, such as scepticism, corroboration, causality, mysticism, and historicity. The MDA showed that false news shares stylistic similarities with traditional and reliable news sources, especially broadsheets. Both false news and broadsheets exhibit informational, involved, narrative, and expository styles. However, false news differs from all other news types in that it does not tend to use an explicitly advocating style. Overall, the study reveals that these similarities and distinctive characteristics contribute to the persuasive and viral impact of false news discourse. The study highlights the significant threat posed by false news, noting that false news can gain credibility and traction by imitating credible journalism and that false news can be difficult to detect by detection algorithms based on surface-level stylistic features. Moreover, the study emphasises that the key factor for the linguistic variations between false news and true news is false news’s primary goal of challenging mainstream narratives. Recognizing the contradictory nature of false news compared to established narratives and the potential for audience low credulity, false news writers strategically design their discourse to appeal to audiences in a manner distinct from true news. This finding underscores the pervasive issues of scepticism and information crisis in society. The thesis concludes with a reflection on the corpus and the mixed-method approach, as well as recommendations for future research and practical implications.25 0