Understanding the Nature of Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody in Arabic Political Discourse

Abstract The current study aims to investigate the nature of Arab-Israeli conflict in Arabic political discourse. This study seeks to examine the possibility of using a corpus-driven study of semantic prosody to analyze Arabic political discourse. The researchers compiled a bi-directional parallel corpus that consists of two types of King Abdullah II’s of Jordan speeches (Arabic and English). Then the researchers used WordSmith Tools in order to obtain the data required, i. e., which mostly consist of collocations associated with five selected nouns, (‘Israel,’ ‘Palestine,’ ‘Arab,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘terrorism’), respectively along with their frequency. The results show a variation in the collocations used with the five nouns in both types of speeches and a variation in the occurrence of these nouns. While reflecting different thematic focus, this variation suggests different ideologies.