“A Good Muslim is not Afraid of Death” A Corpus-Assisted Study of the Representation of Muslims in the American Press

This thesis investigates how Muslims are portrayed in the American press by examining the nominal collocates of the adjective Muslim, and the adjectival collocates of the noun Muslim. The dominating approach in this study is Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). CADS combines discourse analysis with the methodology of corpus linguistics, and is both quantitative and qualitative, and thus less prone to bias and ‘cherry-picking’. The material used in this thesis is primarily drawn from the Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA), and the framework used for the qualitative analysis is based on Baker et al. (2012) who investigated the representation of Muslims in the British press. The study found that the use of both the adjective Muslim, and the noun Muslim is constantly increasing. In other words, the American press has never been more interested in Muslims than they are now. Furthermore, the American press seems to be concerned mainly with gender inequality, especially in terms of veiling, integration, and terrorism. To sum up, the word Muslim appears predominantly in a negative context, and in contexts that might suggest that the American press has adopted to use a discourse based on an ‘us’ versus ‘they’ mentality