Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)

The CADS approach combines elements of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. Several authors have suggested that corpus linguistic methods can effectively support quantitative and qualitative research in discourse analysis (Baker et al. 2008; Gabrielatos and Baker 2008; Partington 2006; Salama 2011). This combination is lauded as benefitting from both the rigor of the computational analysis and the richness of subsequent qualitative examination. It has gained popularity, in part, because of the reduction of research subjectivity as well as the improvement of research validity through focusing on quantifiable elements of discourse. Recent studies combining CDA and CL apply corpus linguistic tools and examine statistically significant collocations to reveal ideological information about the groups they study (Baker and McEnery 2005; Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery 2012; Gabrielatos and Baker 2008; Knoblock 2017, 2020; Orpin 2005; Prentice and Hardie 2009).

The current project continues the trend of addressing the attitudes toward Muslims in online communities using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a well-established framework for research into the relationship between language and society. It underscores the strategic character of linguistic acts and emphasizes the idea that texts are based upon choices, which are ideologically and sociologically driven (Fairclough 1995). It also emphasizes the interconnectedness between discourse and ideology. In accordance with van Dijk (1995: 17), “ideologies are typically, though not exclusively, expressed and reproduced in discourse and communication”. Thus, it is possible to reconstruct mental structures existing in the national consciousness that would be unavailable for direct observation given the information provided by the discourse.

The Corpus

The material for the study consists of the comments left after Trump’s FB post about his proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the U.S. The choice of FB is dictated by its position as the dominant social networking site since 67% of American adults use this platform, compared to LinkedIn (20%) and Twitter (16%) (Rainie, Smith and Duggan, 2013). Although FB discussions evolve over time, the corpus reflects the state of the conversation at the time it was collected in January 2016. The corpus, nicknamed Ban-the-Muslims (BTM), started with 856,769, and then was reduced to 739,466 tokens, or 621,335 words, by the adjustments described below.

To ensure validity, it was necessary to separate the comments of Trump supporters from the writing of those who left critical remarks. However, software was unable do it, and manually sorting the two sets would have been prohibitively time-consuming. Instead, the researcher manually checked the concordance lines including all tokens of ‘Muslim’ and deleted comments that expressed a critical attitude toward Trump or his proposal. Even though the resulting corpus, almost definitely, still contains many comments made by people who joined the discussion to argue against the ban, those comments should not affect the concordances and constructions involving the lemmas discussed here. To reduce the influence of pre-compiled texts which were reposted multiple times, and concentrate on the spontaneous discussion, frequency lists and collocates were manually scanned, and if multiple postings of identical texts were detected, all but one occurrence were deleted from the corpus. Words written in foreign scripts were eliminated.

The results obtained from the BTM corpus were compared to the data from the COCA corpus. COCA was chosen because it is arguably the largest, well-balanced, and up-to-date corpus of the American variety of English freely available for research. Considering that COCA accumulates a very large sample of texts (approximately 20 million words) a year, evenly divided between several genres (20% each of spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts), it serves as a good reference point of the national view on the issue discussed in the BTM. The choice was also influenced by the fact that COCA allows limiting searches to a particular year. This project needed to stay within the context of the BTM corpus, and Trump’s proposal came on 17th November 2015, so the year 2015 was used for COCA searches.

Two research questions were posed in the current study:

1. Is there any significant difference in terms of lexical frequencies and distributions between Trump supporters’ discourse and the national discourse regarding Muslim immigration?

2. What are the collocation patterns of the lexemes identifying Muslims in the corpus under analysis? Is there a significant difference in the image of Muslims shared by the focus discourse community and the general American public?

The analysis of the corpus proceeded as follows: first, the word frequency list was created to identify the most frequent and salient lemmas; then, collocations of the keywords were identified and examined; and, finally, the outcomes were compared with the data from COCA in order to identify any mismatch between the ideology of the group under analysis and the overall American attitude toward Muslims.

Frequency

The Sketch Engine Word List tool was used to identify the most frequent words in the corpus. Unsurprisingly, the most frequent content/open class lemma was TRUMP, which was used 7,395 times (10,000.50 words per million or wpm). The next 24 were:

These 25 most frequent lemmas seem to draw a triangle of three main agents: Trump, the USA and its citizens, and Muslims. After that, the high-frequency words describe the needs, intentions, or actions of those agents.

Checking the frequency of these lemmas in the COCA corpus, we see that they are considerably less prominent there. The name TRUMP occurs only 3,064 times during the whole year 2015, so its wpm score is about 0.015; MUSLIMS are 1,882 or 0.009 wpm; and AMERICA/AMERICAN are 12,602 or 0.063 wpm. The frequency list showed that the BTM corpus compiled for this project is a good source of information about the attitudes toward Muslims and beliefs about them since the conversation revolves around Islam and Muslims in general and Muslim immigration to the U.S. in particular.

Collocational Data

Having identified the focus terms for further investigation, the collocation function of Sketch Engine was used to compile a list of collocations of the lemma MUSLIM. The collocates were arranged according to the overall frequency of the collocation in the corpus, but they had to have an MI of 3 or higher to ensure collocational significance. They also had to be lexical rather than functional and to appear in the corpus a minimum of twice in order to be included. The results were later compared to the list of collocations of the lemma MUSLIM from COCA texts from the year 2015.

Ban-the-Muslims and COCA Comparison

A query for MUSLIM produced 3,683 concordance lines (4,981wpm) in the BTM corpus. Below is the list of 50 most frequent collocates. The number before the word indicates its rank by frequency, the number after it is the raw frequency of the collocation in the corpus, and the number in parenthesis – the MI score.

Several of the frequent collocates have negative connotations. The third most common one, the verb to ‘ban’, shows the attitude of the speakers who want to keep Muslims out and away from their country. The fourth most common collocate is ‘terrorist’ and the tenth is to ‘kill’. Lower on the list, one encounters the words ‘radical’, ‘problem’, ‘hate’, and ‘bad’, and the list of the 50 most frequent collocated words finishes with ‘sharia’ (which carries an extremely negative connotation in the discourse community under analysis), ‘bombers’, and ‘attack’.

Several of the words carry a positive connotation, such as ‘good’ or ‘peaceful’; however, the examination of the concordance lines shows that they are mostly used in the sentences stating that all Muslims need to be banned because it is difficult to determine which ones are good and peaceful and which ones are not. Some collocates, such as ‘Koran’ or ‘Islam’, refer to Muslims’ religion. A prominent group of verbs frame Muslims as an outgroup by focusing on their perceived desire to enter the USA (‘come’, ‘want’) and the need to prevent them from doing that (‘ban’, ‘stop’, ‘let’, ‘allow’, ‘keep’).

Comparing the semantic profile of the lemma MUSLIM in COCA corpus, we encounter the following 50 most frequent lemmas collocating with it:

Looking at the common collocates of the word Muslim obtained from the COCA collection of texts from 2015, it is easy to see that the discussions mentioning Muslims were more evenhanded and did not carry much negativity toward Muslims. Many of the collocates are related to geographical or ethnic concepts (‘France’, ‘French’, ‘Bosnian’, ‘countries’, ‘British’, ‘Arab’, ‘European’, ‘Western’, ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindus’, ‘German’, ‘Roma’, ‘Turkish’) or religion (‘Christians’, ‘Christian’, ‘Jews’, ‘Sunni’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘religious’, ‘religion’, ‘Jewish’, ‘prayers’, ‘faith’, ‘Islamic’, ‘non-Muslims’, ‘Shiite’, ‘cleric’, ‘devout’). The only troubling collocate that was frequently accompanying the words ‘Muslim’ or ‘Muslims’ was ‘brotherhood’, undoubtedly referring to the Muslim Brotherhood organization considered a terrorist group by the U.S. However, the lemmas ‘Christian’ and ‘community’, occur more frequently than ‘brotherhood’: the two religious groups, ‘Christians’ and ‘Muslims’, are mentioned together twice as often as the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, and the ‘community’ and ‘communities’ are used together with ‘Muslims’ almost 1.5 times as often as ‘Muslim Brotherhood’.

The most frequent word on the list with a clear negative connotation is ‘radical’, and there are only 11 instances in the 20-million-word corpus when ‘Muslim’ and ‘radical’ were used within 5 words from each other. The other negative words, such as ‘fatalism’, ‘extremism’ and ‘slave’ are even less frequent (at 10 uses each).

The comparison of the collocate lists from BTM and COCA shows that the group discussing the proposal to ban Muslims deviated from the all-American tone at the time of the speech. Not only were they (unsurprisingly given the topic of conversation) much more focused on Muslims and Islam, but they had a substantially more negative stance toward them, and much of the discussion revolved around the need to protect the American citizens from the perceived threat of the influx of Muslims. The collocates of these negative lemmas in BTM constitute 21.7 % of all the 3,595 collocations of the 50 most frequent lemmas, while in COCA they represent only 4.8% of the 1,017 collocations.

Looking at the collocates of ISLAM, one can see that it was used 1,236 times in the BTM corpus or 1,671 times per million. The following comprise the 50 most frequent collocates:

The list reflects the fact that the discussions refer to Islam as a totalitarian ideology that exerts full control over the followers and ‘requires complete submission’ to it in all spheres of life. Muslims are said to want it to be integrated in the ‘government’ of the countries they live in as the ‘law’. Islam is argued to be ‘radical’, disposed to waging a ‘war’ and ‘killing’, and is associated with ‘ISIS’. Its quintessence is the ‘sharia’ law that is ‘antithetical’ to ‘democracy’ and the American way of life. People following this religion need to be ‘banned’ and ‘prohibited’ from ‘entering’ the U.S.

ISLAM in COCA:

Unlike the lemma MUSLIMS, ISLAM in the COCA in 2015 displayed more negativity and rejection. There are more geographical names, such as Indonesia, Jerusalem, Pakistan or the words related to the various sections of Islam (‘Shia’ and ‘Sunni’), and references to Islam’s holy prophet (‘prophet’, ‘Muhammad’). However, the more numerous and frequent group bears a strong negative association with this religion: ‘radical’, ‘war’, ‘suicide’, ‘insulting’, ‘hate’, ‘terrorism’, ‘hatred’, and so on. They represent 41.6% of the 567 collocations of the 50 most frequent lemmas in COCA, while in BTM the negative collocations formed only 22% of the total 1,978 collocations with the lemma ISLAM.

KORAN/QURAN in BTM:

The Muslims’ holy book, according to the people discussing it on Trump’s FB page, is an instruction manual for ‘killing’ ‘non-Muslims’ or ‘infidels’, encouraging ‘jihad’, ‘war’, ‘murdering’ and ‘beheading’ the ‘enemies’, and spreading ‘rape’, ‘death’, and ‘violence’.

QURAN/KORAN in COCA:

Quran/Koran in COCA was mentioned much less frequently. Because the minimum collocation count to be included in this analysis was set at two, there are only 29 collocates that were found in COCA in the year 2015 with an MI of 3 or above. Many of them concentrate on the religious practices related to Islam’s Holy Scripture: ‘memorize’, ‘recite’, ‘read’, ‘exegesis’, as well as its features, such as ‘narration’. There is a mention of desecrating of a Quran and burning it or tearing a page out of it and the name of a notorious Christian leader, ‘Williams’, who stirred controversy with his plans to burn the Quran. Checking the concordances shows that the Quran is a victim of antagonism and hostility since there were proposals to ban it and attempts to desecrate it.

Overall, in BTM the negative collocations added to 17.7% of the total 904, and in COCA only 7.9% of the 76 collocations can be interpreted as presenting the Quran in a negative way, and such collocations as ‘desecrate’, ‘burning’, and ‘tear’ which constitute another 7.9% show the Quran as a victim of hatred and abuse.

SHARIA/SHARIAH in BTM:

In the BTM corpus, ‘Sharia’ is depicted as a scary attribute of Islam that all Muslims want to follow themselves and want to impose and force on everyone else. It is a set of barbaric laws that are not compatible with democracy and are aimed at establishing an Islamic ‘Caliphate’. It also supports ‘killings’, suppression of ‘women’, deals with ‘theft’, and is used by ‘radicals’ and ‘terrorists’.

SHARIA/SHARIAH in COCA:

The concept is much less salient for the general American public who produced the texts included in COCA 2015 collection. Because the minimum frequency of the collocation was set at 2, the collocation tool identified only 19 collocates to the lemma sharia/shariah:

Not only are the collocated terms significantly less frequent, they also do not share the negative tone characteristic for the BTM corpus in relation to Sharia. The COCA corpus basically notes that Sharia is a set of laws obeyed by the followers of Islam and leaves it at that. A word with a clear negative connotation is ‘censor’; the others might be used in a negative sense in a particular context but are not as clearly and universally agreed upon as negative, such as ‘kill’, for example.

Only 3.3% of the collocates of the lemma SHARIA in BTM are clearly negative out of the 726 collocations, though the tone of the concordances is quite negative. However, among the 87 collocations from COCA, only 2.3% are perceptibly negative.

REFUGEE in BTM:

For the participants of the discussion of whether Muslims should be ‘banned’ from the U.S., the refugees are the ‘Muslims’ from ‘Syria’ and very likely ‘terrorists’ associated with ‘ISIS’. It is difficult to properly ‘vet’ them and ensure that they are safe to ‘enter’ the United ‘States’. The immigration ‘processes’ are very important in preventing them from coming to this country, ‘illegal’ ‘immigration’ needs to be ‘halted’, and legal immigration needs to be ‘paused’.

REFUGEE in COCA:

Refugees in COCA do not bear the negative connotations they have in BTM. The discussions rotate around the geographical locations, the names of large refugee camps, the names of the international organizations assisting refugees and the officials of those organizations (e.g., Guterres is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in charge of such programs. Some social events such as birth or marriage or the particulars of the escape from one place to another, such as ‘arrive’, ‘resettle’, and similar are included. If there are words with negative connotation, such as ‘crisis’, they are not mentioned as the effects of the flow of refugees. On the contrary, they are the cause of the displacement.

Altogether, 10.6% out of the 452 collocations in BTM were negative, while none of the 365 collocations in COCA can be seen as showing a critical attitude toward refugees.

IMMIGRANT in BTM:

Immigrants in BTM are ‘immoral’, ‘unlawful’ people who cause problems, insult and hate Americans, and commit terror acts. They need to be ‘stopped’, ‘excluded’, ‘denied’ entry, ‘banned’, ‘deported’, and should never have been allowed in the U.S in the first place.

IMMIGRANT in COCA:

While the COCA corpus texts also associated immigrants with such problems as crossing the border, staying in the country illegally, crime, and killings, they are spread out over a broader semantic range and mention the countries of origin, while discussing other issues, such as smuggling, scholarships for students who are not legal immigrants, and advocates and activists helping them, in addition to mentioning the problems. In the BTM, 28.2% of the 651 collocations are negative, but in COCA the frequency of negative collocations is substantially lower and the percentage is 23.1%.