The rhetoric of “faith” in the Malaysian media’s representation of football / Nadhratunnaim Abas

Nadhratunnaim , Abas (2020) The rhetoric of “faith” in the Malaysian media’s representation of football / Nadhratunnaim Abas. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

The present study investigates rivalry discourse in football news of the Malaysian media, The Star which has been produced by local news authors who also refer to themselves as the faithful fans of football teams. As they express faith in their team, these news authors tend to compare their team against the others by highlighting their superiority and inferiority. Hence, the study intends to examine the use of “faith” in rhetorically influencing the media representation of football and the social actors involved in the news (the local and international football teams). Corpus-assisted analysis and approaches in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) are employed in order to examine the meanings of “faith” and the actors associated with it in the context of football. Corpus-assisted analysis looks at the concordances, collocations and prosodies of the occurrences and co-occurrences of “faith” to identify the associated words that can indicate its meanings as well as to gauge the attitudes implied by such associations. They are then compared with those in the reference corpora, British National Corpus (BNC) to validate the findings. The analysis of the actors associated with “faith” is performed using the CDS approaches of actor analysis based on Wodak’s (2001) referential or nomination strategies and van Leeuwen’s (2008) inclusion and exclusion. The findings indicate that the interdiscursive relations between “faith”, religion and sport unveil theologisation strategy and the positive and negative evaluations of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ that further lead to the cases of intra- and intergroup polarisation that are discussed accordting to van Dijk’s (1998) polarisation strategies. Additionally, the instances of the actors’ superiority and inferiority, which tend to signal Praise and Blame as indicated in Aristotle’s Epideictic Rhetoric (McKeon, 1940), further illustrate the role of “faith” as a naturalised code in the generation of common-sensical assumptions through theologisation of the discourse and polarisation of the actors.

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