الفهرس 
Chapter OneOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The current thesis provides a corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the Egyptian and Ethiopian online news reporting on the issue of constructing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The study uses a combination of the critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach and the methodological tools of corpus linguistics (CL) to compare the representation of the issue and the events related to it in the period between January 2013 to December 2020. The data of the study consist of two specialized corpora of online news reports written in the English language and published by Egyptian and Ethiopian newspapers. The two corpora comprise more than one million words. The study is concerned mainly with how online newspapers in each of the two conflicting countries represent and interpret the issue of the GERD with varied discursive strategies to propagate their ideological ideas and express their political stance. The study builds on Fairclough’s (1995a) model of CDA as the general critical approach to discourse analysis and on van Dijk’ (1998a) ideological square model which is utilized to account for the polarized self-positive and other-negative representation. Further, the study adopts van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic inventory and Halliday’s (1994) transitivity system of process types to identify the representational choices of the social actors participating in the reported events. The findings of the study revealed major differences between the two sources of news reports in their depiction of the issue of the GERD. The issue was framed in each country’s online news reporting within different thematic categories. The lexical analysis has shown some similarities and differences between the two corpora under investigation. The findings have also revealed differences in terms of the grammatical structures employed to depict the issue and the involved social actors and in terms of the strategies of polarized representation. Accordingly, the study could provide significant implications on the impact of the political and ideological stance on media discourse.