Purpose The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words. Design/methodology/approach To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software. Findings This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords. Research limitations/implications Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples. Originality/value This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

This paper is a stylistic/cognitive analysis of a narrative based on Text World Theory (TWT) in an attempt to identify the text worlds, the discourse worlds and the subworlds in the text under analysis. Cognitive Linguistics is an interdisciplinary approach incorporating language and cognitive abilities. Emphasis is on the manner by which humans process language and build mental representations, text-worlds, to reach a thorough comprehension of meaning structures. The short story analyzed is "Beneath the Cracks", by Nicole Disney. This research tries to prove that contextdependent text world analysis of narratives is useful in rendering participants' senses. (TWT), in the works of Werth (1999) and Gavins (2007aGavins ( , 2007b, provides an explanatory account of the way readers build mental models based on the linguistic items presented. TWT explains the process of readers' moving from textual information towards the deep nature of text worlds. It is concluded that TWT demonstrates the cognitive processes taking place through the process of reading, the process that leads to text interpretation and accessing meaning. The short narrative is evidence that TWT is a tool that reveals human mental representations and their changing stages according to life defiance and struggles. This paper is original in its interpretation of new scopes of text meanings based on Text World Theory.

“The privileged” against “the others”, “Us” against “Them”, “the Top” against “the Bottom” and “the Citizen” against “the Refugee/Immigrant”- are all ideologically-based discourses that classify human beings. The present study, being discourse analytical, aims to shed light on some discourses of polarization that are ideologically based and detect examples of such discourses in various fields as politics, science, sport and education. Methodological framework is based on Van Dijk’s models of ideological discourse analysis (2006a, 2006b &2007). Accordingly, a critical analysis of these discourses is applied in order to decode the meaning that lies deep within them, a meaning that reveals the deeply-rooted ideology that makes some believe that they deserve to be “the privileged” while other people are “the others” that are not privileged. Van Dijk’s model of ingroup-outgroup polarization (Emphasizing Our good things and Their bad things; Mitigating Our bad things and their good things) stands as a comprehensive/abstract standard that is to be detected in the data of this study. The paper concludes that the critical analysis of discourse has shown polarization/racism to be widespread in different fields of life. It calls for making changes in the way people think and conceive of “the others”- a first step towards a better socio-political atmosphere.

Purpose This research is a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Trump's speech on January 6, 2021, which results in his supporters' storming the US Capitol in order to challenge certifying Biden's victory. The Democrats accused Trump of incitement of insurrection. Consequently, Trump was impeached. This article investigates Trump's speech to label it as hate speech or free speech. Design/methodology/approach Analytical framework is tri-dimensional. The textual analysis is based on Halliday's notion of process types and Huckin's discourse tools of foregrounding and topicalization. The socio-cognitive analysis is based on Van Dijk's ideological square and his theory of mental models. The philosophical dimension is founded on Habermas's theory of discourse. These parameters are the cornerstones of the barometer that will be utilized to reach an objective evaluation of Trump's speech. Findings Findings suggest that Trump usually endows “I, We, You” with topic positions to lay importance on himself and his supporters. He frequently uses material process to urge the crowds' action. He categorizes Americans into two conflicting poles: He and his supporters versus the media and the Democrats. Mental models are created and activated so that the other is always negatively depicted. Reports about corruption are denied in court. Despite that, Trump repeats such reports. This is immoral in Habermas's terms. The study concludes that Trump delivered hate speech in order to incite the mob to act in a manner that may change the election results. Originality/value The study is original in its tri-dimensional framework and its data of analysis.

News media play an important role in shaping public opinion. Because news is a representation of the world in language (Fowler, 1991:4), this research investigates the manner in which headlines of the top news websites mirror The New Suez Canal, which is a great project and a symbol of Egyptian national pride, on the sixth and the seventh of August 2015, which mark the inauguration of the New Suez Canal. This research investigates the linguistic structures of headlines in the top news websites. The variety of syntactic and lexical features of the sample headlines is analyzed. To describe the syntactic features of headlines, three categories are investigated:the structure, the function and the complexity of the headlines. To describe the lexical features of headlines, individual words under different categories of nouns, verbs, articles, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions are examined. This paper incorporates critical discourse analysis as a method for analysis.