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Genre-structural analysis of Arabic accident news reporting

  • Abdulmohsin A. Alshehri

    Abdulmohsin A. Alshehri is an assistant professor in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Languages and Translation, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Taibah University, Medina, Saudi Arabia. He was awarded a doctorate degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, after being awarded a master degree from the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests lie within the areas of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, media and journalism, educational linguistics, literacy development and ESL/EFL, genre-based pedagogy and Systemic Functional Linguistics.

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Published/Copyright: February 15, 2024

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the structural arrangement of Arabic hard news reporting with reference to a corpus of twenty accident news stories drawn from two leading Middle Eastern news organizations, Aljazeera and Alarabiya. A range of journalistic traditions has been examined with respect to organizational structures used in their hard news reporting texts. Within journalism discourse analysis, the nucleus-satellite structure developed by scholars of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is commonly found in news reporting in English and across various languages. However, news media texts in some cultures, such as Arabic, have not undergone any close scrutiny from a generic perspective. Accordingly, this study attempts to fill such a gap by investigating the genre-related features of the Arabic accident reports, drawing on the insights provided by SFL literature on the news story as a genre. It employs various lines of analysis such as textual deconstruction, timeline, radical editability, and lexical chaining. The findings of these analyses suggest that the Arabic accident news reports are non-chronologically organized operating with the lead-dominated orbital model, and thus generically bearing a close resemblance to the English news reports.


Corresponding author: Abdulmohsin A. Alshehri, Taibah University, Janadah Bin Umayyah Road, Medina, Saudi Arabia, E-mail:

About the author

Abdulmohsin A. Alshehri

Abdulmohsin A. Alshehri is an assistant professor in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Languages and Translation, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Taibah University, Medina, Saudi Arabia. He was awarded a doctorate degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, after being awarded a master degree from the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests lie within the areas of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, media and journalism, educational linguistics, literacy development and ESL/EFL, genre-based pedagogy and Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Appendices
Appendix A

See Figure 7 and Tables 79.

Figure 7: 
Timeline analysis of Arabic accident news report 2.
Figure 7:

Timeline analysis of Arabic accident news report 2.

Table 7:

Reordering of satellites in Arabic accident news report 2.

  1. aThe projecting clauses highlighted in green within square brackets in the edited version were added to smooth the transition.

Table 8:

Patterns of lexis in Arabic accident news report 2.

Table 9:

The number of links entered into by the lead and satellites with each other in Arabic accident news report 2.

See Figures 8 and 9.

Figure 8: 
Lexical centrality in Arabic accident news report 2.
Figure 8:

Lexical centrality in Arabic accident news report 2.

Figure 9: 
Lexical bonding in Arabic accident news report 2.
Figure 9:

Lexical bonding in Arabic accident news report 2.

Appendix B

See Figure 10 and Tables 1012.

Figure 10: 
Timeline analysis of Arabic accident news report 3.
Figure 10:

Timeline analysis of Arabic accident news report 3.

Table 10:

Reordering of satellites in Arabic accident news report 3.

Table 11:

Patterns of lexis in Arabic accident news report 3.

Table 12:

The number of links entered into by the lead and satellites with each other in Arabic accident news report 3.

See Figures 11 and 12.

Figure 11: 
Lexical centrality in Arabic accident news report 3.
Figure 11:

Lexical centrality in Arabic accident news report 3.

Figure 12: 
Lexical bonding in Arabic accident news report 3.
Figure 12:

Lexical bonding in Arabic accident news report 3.

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Received: 2022-09-10
Accepted: 2024-01-16
Published Online: 2024-02-15
Published in Print: 2025-01-29

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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