Critical Discourse Analysis of Attributive Words Used with the word Muslim: A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

This study will examine all the attributive words with the word ‘Muslim’ in the time magazine corpus. This study will basically focus on the choice of attributive words which time magazine used for the Muslims. Language is a discourse so the study of attributive words from the time magazines corpus is a type of media discourse. The critical discourse analysis explores all those social aspects which analyze power, ideology and the interaction of language in various contexts. This analysis is based on Fairclough's three dimensional models which show the ideology of the Americans about the Muslims and only the use of vocabulary has been analyzed under the dimension of textual analysis.
The results show various approaches of the Americans towards the Muslims and which type of thinking is emerging in the society about the Muslims. The study will also explore that how various authors of newspaper use specific attributive words to highlight the image of the Muslims through various attributive words to control the mind of the readers and maintain power in the whole world. Ten words are analyzed having maximum frequency in 1990s TIME MAGAZINE corpus. In time magazine 1990's corpus, it has been proved that how diplomatically they present the Muslim and emerge a hidden negative discourse in the society about Muslims.