Multidimensional discourse analysis of Yazidi women's identity in the daily mail and personal narratives: Sensationalisation vs. Self-Representation

Spanning from early print journalism to the era of broadcast and digital journalism, sensationalism has consistently emerged as a prevalent technique to attract audiences and shape public perception. Research into sensationalism in media discourse is no longer an intellectual indulgence but an absolute necessity for understanding media power. This research, drawing on sensationalist strategies with respect to the representation of Yazidi women, aims to reflect how specific choices in certain linguistic features of media discourse regarding minorities shape and sometimes distort reality during a conflict. While many of such works have addressed the construction of Yazidi women's identities, few have critically analysed the linguistic subtleties that make up the sensationalism of these constructions in the media. To bridge this gap, the thesis conducts a comprehensive analysis that examines lexical choices, syntactic structures, and thematic prioritisation across both media reports and interview data. Grounded in critical discourse analysis and informed by systemic functional linguistics, postcolonial feminist theory, and narrative and social identity theories, this study allows for in-depth textual and contextual analysis of the linguistic and discursive factors underpinning the sensational quality of both media representations and survivors' narratives. Using NVivo 12, the UAM Corpus Tool, and XML markup, the research employs a corpus-based discourse analysis of news stories from Mail Online (2014-2020) alongside interviews with Yazidi women survivors of the 2014 attack. The analysis drew on the frequency and distribution of referential strategies and transitivity patterns to uncover narrative strategies that help build up the potential for the sensational framing of these women. The findings revealed that media framed Yazidi women as passive victims, reinforcing sensationalist stereotypes. In contrast, interviews highlighted their resilience and agency, exposing a stark disparity between media portrayals and their lived experiences. This research calls for complex tools and methodologies in the field of discourse studies to critically reassess issues associated with how the media shapes society's perspective on conflict-affected minorities. In other words, the findings call for a review of reporting approaches within conflict journalism and the language used in media portrayal.