Framing Conflict Through Language: Modality and Discursive Strategies in Global Media Narratives of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

Abstract

This paper analyzes modal framing and discursive strategies of the presentation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the global media by using a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Since the media reporting is ideological, the specific research seeks to investigate how international media houses use modality, lexical tools and framing to create specific discourses about the conflict and its participants. Furthermore, the study is based on the three-dimensional model of CDA by Norman Fairclough and incorporates the corpus linguistic approaches to the analysis of the chosen news stories in the Western and non-Western media. It explores modality patterns, evaluative language and ideological positioning within the discourse of the media. The findings indicate that modal expressions and discursive strategies play an important role in portraying power relations, victimhood and legitimacy in conflict reports. The results also underscore the role played by the language used in the media in supporting ideological views and political interests. In the near future, the research will add to the body of media discourse literature by showing how language plays out in defining how people conceptualize conflict. Further studies can be conducted on multimodal and social media representations as a way of presenting a more comprehensive picture of the current conflict discourses.