Exploring Edward Said's Journalistic Collocations in Al-Ahram Weekly Newspaper: A Corpus-Based Approach

This paper explores Edward Said's journalistic collocations as a discursive practice of the social actors that Said frequently referred to in Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper. Towards this end, a corpus-based approach has been utilized in a methodological synergy that combines the corpus techniques of extracting keywords and calculating collocations as well as the qualitative method of analysing social-actor representations (Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008). The data used for analysis comprise a corpus of virtually all the articles written by Said in Al-Ahram Weekly from 1998 till 2003. The corpus is 105,031words and has been electronically manipulated by the corpus software tools of Wmatrix (Rayson, 2003) and WordSmith (Scott, 2012). The paper has reached three findings. First, Said's journalistic discourse in Al-Ahram Weekly revolves around 38 social-actor keywords that reflect his thematic foci all through the time span he was writing articles for the newspaper. Second, of all these keywords, only twelve node words have been identified to associate with peculiar collocates; the node words were divided into (1) nominations of political personas and (2) genericizations with various discourse functions. Third, Said's peculiar collocations reflected his ideological orientations towards certain political personas and specific topics in his journalistic discourse.