Persuasive strategies: Kurdish national identity construction on Rudaw portal and its impact on receptions

The concept of national identity has been manipulated by media on account of the dichotomous representation of positive ingroup and negative outgroup. Thus, strategies of persuasion are used by media discourse producers as a rhetorical device to form a collective national identity that contributes to shaping a particular social structure. Though abundant studies have investigated the construction of national identity, studies on the national identity construction from linguistical perspective in media suffer scarcity in the Kurdish context. Following Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001) Discourse-historical Approach (DHA), this study aims at examining three discursive strategies for representation of in- and out-groups focusing on the strategies of argumentation as persuasive devices and examining referential strategies and predicational strategies as the basis for the strategies of argumentation to understand the form of Kurdish national identity constructed by Rudaw media, and its impact on receptions. To address the subjectivity in DHA, keyness analysis of corpus linguistic was used for identifying topics in the texts. The data of the study are from opinion articles published on Rudaw digital portal during the years 2014-2019 and data from interviews with the commentators on these articles. The findings revealed that the use of spatialisation prevailed as a linguistic means for realisation of referential strategies to impersonalise the agents and blur the responsibility. For predicational strategies, the study discovered that the negative qualities were rather assigned to Iraq as a country and its government. Topoi were heavily depended on as means of realisation of persuasive strategies, and the prevalent topoi were topos of threat and danger and topos of disadvantage and uselessness. Finally, the study provides a framework for understanding the process followed in Rudaw media for laying down the argumentation scheme which can be a blueprint of a guideline for pedagogical means in teaching rhetorical devices of persuasion.