الفهرس 
Introductionيوجد فقط 14 صفحة متاحة للعرض العام
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المستخلص
Our everyday discourse is ideological. This is evident when we refer to the ideas and
practices of the Others, Their ideology, and how We are the only bearers of the truth. Our
discourse always refers to the polarization of the Us and Them, the in-group and the
out-group (van Dijk, 2011, p.379-380). This does not mean that ideologies are negative or that
the people who share these ideologies are bad. Under various historical, political, economic,
and social circumstances, groups develop their own ideologies to be able to protect their
interests, keep their cohesion as a social group, and to guarantee the loyalty and the on-going
cooperation of the group members. Therefore, sometimes ideologies are employed to
dominate and oppress like racism, sexism, and many others, while at other times they are used
to resist such domination (van Dijk, 2011, p.380).
One example of racial ideologies is Islamophobia. Islamophobia is a topic that,
unfortunately, does not get old. For years, there have been attacks, whether verbal or physical
that can be called Islamophobic in many countries of the world (“List of Islamophobic
incidents”, 2020). The last incident is the 2019 attack on Muslims in a mosque in New
Zealand (“Timeline of New Zealand terror attack”, 2019). And despite the reports that follow
up on Islamophobic thoughts and incidents, conferences that call for co-existence, and even
laws in some countries that posit punishments on Islamophobic and discriminatory acts,
almost every year we witness attacks against Muslims that reveal Islamophobic ideology of
those who commit them.
Islamophobia has its roots back in history; at the time of the Islamic rule (i.e. the three
decades that followed the death of prophet Muhammad), with the Reconquista of Spain and
the Crusades (Allen, 2010, pp.26 - 30), with the mass migrations of Asian Muslims to Britain,
and with the repeated terror attacks all over the world (including attacks against the Muslim
countries themselves). It is important to keep on following up on discourses about Islam and
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Muslims that are circulated in news and all forms of media so that we understand people’s
knowledge, emotions, opinions, circulated topics, and stereotypes of Islam and Muslims and
to take measures if we find a danger of Islamophobia, especially with the growing number of
immigrants who happen to be Muslims all over the world.
Because Ideologies are evaluative in their nature, the present research study utilizes
Martin and White’s Appraisal Framework (2005) as a tool for analysis. Conflict and
disagreement in relation to socio-political issues are usually voiced publicly in political
discussions in mainstream media and social media platforms where the use of explicit and
inexplicit evaluative language is evident. Social media users, while commenting on news
posts and replying to each others’ comments, employ a variety of linguistic resources to
convey their attitude explicitly and inexplicitly when discussing each attack taking place in
England. Therefore, Martin & White’s framework, through its three dimensions, is the best to
detect the explicit attitudinal resources and the afforded attitude (i.e. implicit), to reveal the
intensity and sharpness of the users’ attitude, and to see the degree of the users engagement in
the discourse.
Along with the traditional manual analysis employing the appraisal framework, analysis
of collocations is applied to better highlight the opinion and the ideology of the social media
users’ discourse. Collocations are examined using the corpus tool Sketch Engine. Using
corpus analysis can provide a broader picture of the collocational patterns that exist but may
not be visible through traditional analysis. Corpus tools can assist us in recognizing what
ideological features present which in turn can confirm or deny the existence of a certain
ideology in text (Kyrala, 2009, p.10).
Therefore, the focus of the present study is examining Islamophobia in social media
discourse. This can be achieved through a quantitative analysis of Facebook users’ comments
investigating collocations of Islam and Muslims, in addition to an analysis of the attitude of
Appraisal and Islamophobia in Social Media 3
the users in comments - following Martin and White’s appraisal framework - to highlight how
social media users view the ideology of Islam and Muslims.
0.1 Objectives
This study is about the expression of opinion in social media discourse, in particular the
expression of opinion – variously known as evaluation and appraisal. Hence, these are the
objectives of the present study:
1. To examine the descriptions that collocate with Islam and Muslims. This is achieved
through scanning the selected corpus using Sketch Engine examining frequencies and
collocations.
2. To investigate how Islam and Muslims are depicted in social media discourse through
analysing Facebook users’ comments on posted digital articles following the three systems of
Martin and White’s Appraisal framework: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation .
3. To examine the manifestation of ideology in social media discourse through social media
users’ use of language “commenting” on posted digital articles by relating these comments to
the ideological categories of Membership, Activities, Goals, Values and norms, Position and
group-relations, and Resources.
4. To examine whether the comments reflect Islamophobia in the light of the reductionist and
comparative approaches.
0.2 Research Questions
This study suggests that posts and comments in social networking sites (SNSs), and
Facebook in particular, have significant information content. Therefore, the researcher intends
to find answers to these research questions:
1. Using the corpus tool, Sketch Engine, what are the themes that emerge while analysing
social media users’ comments on the posted news articles about the attacks that took place in
the United Kingdom in 2017?
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2. Using the corpus tool, Sketch Engine, what descriptions collocate with the words (Islam)
and (Muslim) in the analysed comments?
3. Following Martin and White’s appraisal theory, what is the attitude of social media users
towards Islam and Muslim? How are the attitudinal resources voiced: in Monoglossic or
Heteroglossic backdrop? And whether this attitude is graduated by focus or force?
4. How do concordances, collocations and Martin and White’s evaluative sources that occur
in the comments describe what van Dijk calls ideological-related topics and meanings:
self-identity, activity, goal, norms and values, position and relation?
5. In light of the reductionist and comparative approaches, how do these ideological
descriptions relate to Islamophobia?
0.3 Data selection
The size of the data selected is manageable to allow manual, context-sensitive analysis, in
this case an Appraisal analysis; but large enough to exhibit a certain degree of
representativeness, and enable some generalizability. The articles were found using Facebook
advanced search tool, where one can filter results by keywords, name of source, and date.
0.4 Data Description
Comments on Facebook include paralinguistic and extra-linguistic features; like the
emoticons, gifs, and pictures. Users can like and reply to each comment as well. Two
thousand three hundred and twenty one comments (2321 comments) on eleven posted news
articles are included in the analysis. The articles report and discuss terror attacks by Muslims
and against Muslims in the UK, and the comments undergoing analysis express their opinion
towards Islam and Muslims.
The discourse-context of the present study focuses on a turbulent time in England, the
year 2017, where five attacks took place in different areas in the country. The incidents took
place in the United Kingdom between March and September 2017. These attacks are the
Appraisal and Islamophobia in Social Media 5
attacks of 1) Westminster, where six people died, including the attacker, and at least 50
people were injured after a terror attack near the Houses of Parliament in March 2017; 2)
Manchester, where a 22-year-old Muslim attacker detonated a home-made bomb in the
arena’s foyer as crowds were leaving a musical performance in May 2017, killing 22 and
injuring 116; 3) London Bridge, where a van hit pedestrians on London Bridge, then three
men got out and stabbed people in nearby Borough Market, killing seven and injuring 48 in
June 2017; 4) Finsbury Park, where a vehicle mounted the pavement outside Muslim Welfare
House - which is also a community centre, injuring nine people in June 2017; last is 5)
Parsons Green, where Twenty-nine people including a young boy were injured when a bomb
partially detonated and sent a ball of fire along a carriage of a District line train at Parsons
Green, west London in September 2017.
The articles chosen for analysis are published by The Times, The Guardian, The
Telegraph, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and The Sun newspapers on their websites and
their Facebook official pages. The comments under investigation are cleared of emoticons,
pictures, gifs, tags, embedded links, so that only text is analysed.
0.5 Significance of the Study
The study fills a gap in the literature examining the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Up to
the researcher’s knowledge, most of the studies that examine Islamophobia do not define
specific features of Islamophobic discourse, but rather examine the circulated topics regarding
Islam and Muslims and themes that emerge mainly through employing corpus and content
analysis. Therefore, the present study defines exactly what makes discourse Islamophobic by
examining data following the Reductionist approach which highlights what is called the
“Closed Views” towards Islam and Muslims. Second, the present study approaches
Islamophobia from a Comparative approach. By comparing Islamophobia to racial
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discourses, the study highlights many of the features of New Racism that are detected in the
analysed data.
Moreover, the study employs van Dijk’s framework of analysing ideological discourse
(van Dijk, 1998 & 2000) to highlight how users view Islam and Muslims ideology. This can
be recognised by examining how users’ attitude towards Islam and Muslims is structured in
the form of Problem- Solution, and how it is represented as a group Schema consisting of
categories. Additionally, van Dijk’s conceptual “Ideological Square” is employed to better
examine how users’ attitude towards Islam and Muslims is structured all through the analysed
data.
Furthermore, since most of the existing research on Islamophobia is corpus research
depending mainly on themes, concordance, and collocation analysis; the present study adds to
the literature of detecting Islamophobic discourse by applying Appraisal analysis assisted with
Corpus analysis to deeply understand what exactly users criticize when discussing topics
related to Islam and Muslims (attitude), how intense and sharp is their opinion (graduation),
and whether they acknowledge other points of view (engagement).
0.6 Significance of data
Comment on social media is a significant data for two reasons: first, social media
including social networking sites (SNSs) are an important source from where we gather
information about people, their attitudes, value system, preferences, as well as what is
happening around us in the world (Batabyal, Banerjee, and Bandyopadhyay, 2014, p.177).
Second, comment writing on social networks stands as a particular type of expository text, the
structure of which highlights the exposition of arguments that support a belief or an opinion
that sometimes is not expressed directly (Arancibia & Montecino, 2017, p.605). For these two
reasons, the study examines social media users’ comments on one widely used social
networking platform, which is Facebook.
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0.7 Method of Analysing Data
The data selected is analysed both qualitatively following Martin and White’s (2005)
Appraisal Theory, and quantitatively focusing on concordance and collocations using the
corpus tool: Sketch Engine. This “Triangulation”, or the use of a variety of data collection
methods, improves the validity of research findings and aids in providing robust
interpretations and explanations (Baker, 2006, p.17).
The steps of analysis are as follows: First, a quantitative analysis of the comments is
conducted. The data is scanned for frequencies and collocations especially those that collocate
with the roots Islam and Muslim using the corpus tool Sketch Engine. Moreover, themes that
emerge across the comments are highlighted. Second, qualitative analysis of the comments
employing Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal system of Attitude, Graduation, and
Engagement is applied. Afterwards, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are linked to
van Dijk’s (1998 & 2000) approach to ideology to highlight how users across the comments
view the ideology of Islam and Muslims. This will be achieved by following van Dijk’s
model that organises attitude into problem-solution, group schema, and a conceptual
ideological square. Finally, the study compares the analysed comments to what is called the
“Closed Views” and to the features of “New Racism” to explore whether the comments
exhibit Islamophobic markers or not.
0.8 Structure of the Thesis
The present research study is divided into two integral parts: The theoretical part which
is chapter one of the thesis. The second part is concerned with the data analysis, and this
comprises chapters two and three, in addition to chapter 4 -the Discussion, and a Conclusion.
The paragraphs below provide a general overview of the structure of the research, as well as
the information pertaining to the content of its main sections