Ghayth Al-shaibani

The Iraq War 2003: a Critical Discourse Analysis Ghayth Al-shaibani

The Iraq war 2003 has been studied by many scholars. However,the author believes that so far there has been no attempt to thoroughly investigate this war linguistically and ideologically. As such,this book focuses on how media portray this war and how language and ideology are manifested. This book examines the subsequent events of the Iraq war 2003 by selecting 11 stories from the BBC news website. The corpus covers three years (2005-2008). The author employs van Dijk's (1980) theory of Semantic Macrostructure to examine the news discourse at the macro-level and micro-level,and van Dijk's(1998) theory of ideology to investigate group ideology at both levels. The linguistic and ideological analyses are supported by background information where a historical and political critique is provided to ensure objectivity in the process of interpretation. This is based on Wodak's(2001a) discourse-historical approach. The book introduces a more reliable and objective CDA approach. It is of great use and ideal practice for undergraduates and postgraduates as well as researchers undertaking disciplines such as critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics,politics,media studies and mass communication.