Tracing the Meaning of Ideologies, A Diachronic Corpus Assisted Discourse Approach on The Study of the Ideology of ‘Alibrāliyah’ in the Saudi Context.

The aim of this study is to present a framework to trace the meaning of ideologies and the means by which they are constructed over time. In the case of this study, I investigate the ideology of „alibrāliyah‟ 1 in the Saudi socio-political context. „Alibrāliyah‟, corresponding to liberalism in English, is a loanword to Arabic that started to be contested recently amongst opposing groups who attempt to charge it with their own ideological meaning. This article presents a framework designed for examining the diachronic construction of the ideology of „alibrāliyah‟ at macro and micro levels. This combines Corpus Linguistics methods with Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and Discourse Theory (DT). The framework is employed by examining the discourse of „alibrāliyah‟ in a corpus of Saudi newspaper articles (575 articles) that discuss mainly „alibrāliyah‟ over the period (2007-2016). The analysis of the articles has revealed that „alibrāliyah‟ is mainly associated with the discourse of religion and the discourse of human rights in which it shifts from being associated with the religious discourse to the discourse of freedom. This shift in meaning represents the success of liberals to establish their identity in the Saudi society.