Planning for Transformation: A Semantic-Grammatical Based Discourse Analysis of Saudi Vision 2030

Abstract

The need for transformation has led kingdom to envision and encode the Saudi Vision 2030 document; it is not merely an idealistic divination but a manuscript with an appropriate plan to accomplish its anticipated economic and social goals. In fact, planning is a critical factor in the document, which shapes it as a discourse of realization and fascination, made in the public interest. The present research aims to investigate the ways strategic planning has been articulated in the Vision 2030 document. It can help to get a deep linguistic understanding of this ideological discourse as well as to make it comprehendible for familiar readers. The core purpose of the present study is to examine this ideological discourse for the linguistic items that encapsulate the planning factor. For this purpose, the text has been reviewed using the foundational document model projected by Holland (2014). This semantic-grammatical based linguistic model helps to investigate the ideological strand of planning in the selected text. The research design is quantitative, using a content analysis method. The results reveal that planning strategies are well voiced in the Vision 2030 document, using a variety of vocabulary items; Investment, support, cooperation, provision, and increment are found as the fundamental strategies. The study suggests that other linguistic features can also be investigated to explain this document in the public interest.

The Wake of Modernistic Tourism in the Kingdom: A Multimodal Analysis of Online Discourse

“…However, referring to the Saudi Vision 2030 (SV 2030), the studies conducted with a linguistic analysis perspective are only a few mainly because it is relatively a new and specific research paradigm. The notable researches include but are not limited to exploring the effective contribution English can play towards the success of the Vision (Alzahrani, 2017), the perceptions and attitudes of the teachers towards implementing the Vision (Al-Zahrani & Rajab, 2017), bringing the women out from the realm of invisibility to visibility (Eum, 2019), the analysis of the document itself through corpus--assisted critical analysis approach (Mohammad & Alshahrani, 2019), and a semantic-grammatical based discourse analysis (Hameed et al, 2020), and the corpus-based critical discourse analysis investigating the visualisation of women empowerment in the SV 2030 (Afzal & Omar, 2021). However, none of the previous research applies multimodal analysis to critically analyse the online discourse emancipated in the light of the SV 2030 to promote the tourism industry within the Kingdom.…”

“…S ince its initiation in 2016, Saudi Vision 2030 has been considered a blueprint for the Kingdom's social, cultural, and economic growth reducing its dependence on and recognition of being an oil-based economy only (Hameed et al, 2020). Pertaining to the fact that the Middle East has been emerging as a prominent tourist region (Abuhjeeleh, 2019) tourism has become one of the main sectors the Kingdom envisions to promote to diversify the economy.…”