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Article published In: The Discourse of Terrorism
Edited by Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio and Juan L. Castro
[Pragmatics and Society 13:3] 2022
► pp. 431–452

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“They fabricated lies against us and described us in the harshest of ways”

An analysis of the transitivity patterns used in the online magazine DABIQ

 | Simon Fraser University
Published online: 21 July 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21014.bar
Abstract
Over the past decade, Islamic State (ISIS) has made numerous attempts to propagate their beliefs on a global scale via a range of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), enabling them to reach an extensive audience within a very short time span; when successful, people enlist as supporters of their ideas and, essentially, become radicalised. ISIS also achieve this through publishing propaganda materials, such as the two online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah (Heidarysafa, Mojtaba, Kamran Kowsari, Tolu Odukoya, Philip Potter, Laura E. Barnes, and Donald E. Brown. 2019. Women in ISIS Propaganda: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of Topics and Emotions in a Comparison with Mainstream Religious Group. [URL]). In this paper, our focus lies with the former. Through a transitivity analysis of three issues from Dabiq, this paper explores how the in-group (the believers) and the Other (the non-believers) are represented in the magazine. The transitivity framework is useful here because it exposes the linguistic choices that people make and, in turn, reveals how they perceive their world. To retrieve both quantitative and qualitative findings, the UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell, Michael. 2016. The UAM Corpus Tool (Version 3.3). [URL]) is employed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Relevant studies
  • 3.Theoretical background
    • 3.1Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
    • 3.2Transitivity
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1How are ISIS, their values and the Other (i.e. the non-supporters of ISIS) portrayed in the discourse of Dabiq? Are positive and/or negative associations encountered specifically with the in-group (i.e. ISIS) or the out-group (i.e. the non-believers)?
    • 5.2Is there any evidence of changes across time in terms of how the authors of Dabiq represent ISIS and the Other?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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