IDEOLOGICAL COLLOCATION IN META-WAHHABI DISCOURSE POST-9/11: A Symbiosis of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics AMIR HAMZA YOUSSEF SALAMA A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE LANCASTER UNIVERSITY UNITED KINGDOM June 2011 ProQuest Number: 11003574 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003574 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own work and has been submitted for the PhD degree from the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. I also declare that it has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. ABSTRACT This thesis attempts to answer the following overarching question: How has Wahhabi Islam been ideologically recontextualized across post-9/11 opposing discourses via collocation? Drawing on a methodological synergy of corpus linguistics and CD A (Baker et al. 2008; Salama 20111), I propose a linguistic model for explicating the ideological nature of collocation between two clashing books: Stephen Schwartz’s (2002) The Two Faces o f Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror and Natana DeLong-Bas’s (2004) Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. The two books, produced post-9/11, take diametrically opposing stances towards the same socio-religious practice of Wahhabi Islam/Wahhabism. First, using WorSmith5, keywords were used to identify the different semantic foci in the two texts, along with their relevant ‘macropropositions’ (Van Dijk 1980, 1995, 2009b). A small number of keywords were selected for further analysis, and their functions in contributing towards ideologies were investigated by examining their collocates, relying on the concepts of textual synonymy, oppositional paradigms and argumentative fallacies. 1 This is a PhD-based paper that I published in 2011 at the Journal oD f iscourse & Society under the title ‘Ideological collocation and the recontextualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11: a synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis’. -ii- Second, the meta-Wahhabi discourses underlying the two texts are analysed by focusing on the discourse processes of producing, interpreting and explaining the patterns of collocations in the texts. Contextual information, such as relevant biographical information relating to the text producers, was taken into account. Additionally, a socio-cognitive approach was used to consider ideological coherence and socio-religious schemas which motivated the ideological use of collocations in both texts. Finally, from a social-semiotic perspective, interdiscursive meanings and the symbolic power invested with the collocating words as religious or political signs are queried. The findings offered in the present thesis cover methodological and theoretical aspects. First, on a theoretical level, there are findings that relate to how collocation as a micro textual resource can closely interface with other macro discourse and language processes, e.g. ideology, (social) cognition, semiotics and interdiscursivity. Second, on a methodological level, this study has contributed to the presently well-established ‘methodological synergy’ of corpus linguistics and CDA in a symbiotic fashion. This can be recognized in two respects: 1) compared to pure CDA research, the methodological procedure followed in this study (which goes from the quantitative to the qualitative methods) renders the identification of the linguistic phenomenon - collocation - studied in this research far less subjectively identified; 2) the possibility of contextualizing the keywords extracted from one text by conducting a macropropositional analysis (i.e. identifying the topics and themes) in this text. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, teacher and mentor, Dr Paul Baker, who taught me how to be productively self-critical. I cannot thank him enough for his painstakingly hard work on the present thesis and for his fruitful discussions, lectures, seminars, and presentations that I really enjoyed and benefited from across the past three years or so. Without his academic support, this work would have been nothing but a dream! Many thanks to Professor Tony McEnery and Professor Paul Chilton for their invaluable comments and incisive remarks as upgrade examiners of the present piece of work. Also, I am especially grateful to Dr Andrew Wilson for his practical guidance in the post-confirmation panel as well as for his great efforts as the internal examiner of the thesis. Further, it behoves me to thank Dr John Richardson, the external examiner of the thesis, for the time and effort he has expended in reading and examining this voluminous thesis. All thanks and respects to my wife, Abeer, and my kids, Omnia and Muhannad, who willingly and happily sacrificed their family time so that I can give this thesis its best shot. Last but not least, I am indebted to my bigger family, Egypt, who generously funded this doctoral project from A to Z. The Egyptian Cultural Centre and Educational Bureau in London has always been a great asset to me in the course of my stay in the UK. TABLE OF CONTENTS A BSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .....................................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ...............................................................................................................................x LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................. xii CHAPTER 1: Introduction ..................................................................................................................1 1.1 Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 1.2 Key concepts .......................................................................................................................2 1.2.1 Discourse(s), discursive practice and te x t ......................................................2 1.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ................................................................. 3 1.2.3 Interdiscursivity .................................................................................................. 3 1.2.4 Ideology/Ideologies........................................................................................... 4 1.2.5 Recontexualization ..............................................................................................5 1.2.6 Corpus linguistics ...............................................................................................5 1.2.7 Collocation(s) ...................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Research problem .............................................................................................................. 7 1.3.1 Politico-religious context of the problem......................................................... 7 1.3.1.1 Wahhabi Islam vs. Saudi W ahhabism ............................................... 8 1.3.1.2 Why Saudi Wahhabism and Wahhabi Islam? .............................. 13 1.3.1.3 Position of the analyst ........................................................................ 17 1.3.2 Linguistic context of the problem....................................................................18 1.4 Rationale of the study ......................................................................................................19 1.5 Theoretical and methodological approach .................................................................. 20 1.6 Research questions ..........................................................................................................21 1.7 Thesis structure ................................................................................................................ 22 CHAPTER 2: Critical Literature Review.................................................................................... 24 2.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................24 2.2 Towards a politics of meaning: lexical association, discourse and ideology 24 2.2.1 Essential precursors ..........................................................................................25 2.2.2 From ideology to discourse ............................................................................ 27 2.2.3 Meaningful antagonisms and the discursive process ................................ 28 2.3