The influence of audience on the topics discussed by King Abdullah II of Jordan: a corpus-assisted discourse study

ABSTRACT

Presidential speeches are among the best ways to demonstrate heads of state’s competence in dealing publically with domestic as well as foreign issues, and thus contribute to their political survival. This study uses a new one-million-word parallel corpus of Arabic and English to investigate the political topics that King Abdullah II of Jordan discusses when using the Arabic language to address Jordanian or Arab audiences and when using the English language to address Western/international audiences. The corpus covers the period from 1999 to 2015. Using Wordsmith 7 and examining the most frequent 25 Arabic and English words, we found that King Abdullah tends to discuss particular issues on all occasions, locally, nationally, and globally. These include Arab and regional matters as well as the peace process in the Middle East. It is also found that local themes that are mainly associated with Jordan, its political system, and economic and social challenges were more frequent in the Arabic corpus when compared to its English counterpart. However, Jordan’s involvement in some issues in the Middle East, especially in Palestine and Iraq, was more important in the English texts. The study concludes that parallel corpora can be a rich resource for discourse studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic-English
• parallel corpus
• audience adaptation
• frequency analysis
• corpus linguistics
• King Abdullah II of Jordan
• presidential speeches

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmad S. Haider

Ahmad S. Haider is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Translation at the Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan. He is also a researcher at the MEU Research Unit, Middle East University, Amman, Jordan. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Canterbury/New Zealand. His main areas of interest include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and translation studies.

Alia Ahmad

Alia Ahmad received her MA in Linguistics from the University of Jordan/Jordan. Her current research focuses on Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, (Critical) Discourse Analysis, and Pragmatics.

Sane Yagi

Sane Yagi is currently a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sharjah and the University of Jordan. received his education in Jordan, USA, and New Zealand. The primary themes are corpus development, computational lexicography and lexicology, computational morphology, syntactic parsing, automatic punctuation, and machine learning. His research interests include computational linguistics, CMC, CALL, and TEFL.

Bassam H. Hammo

Prof. Bassam H. Hammo earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from DePaul University/USA in 2002 and his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Northeastern Illinois University in 1993. His research interests include Arabic Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He teaches Database Management Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Data Mining.