Keyness for Revelation of Self and Other Representation in Kurdish National Identity Construction

Abstract

The presentation of Self and Other as the basis of inclusion and exclusion strategies, which is the core of ideologically formation of national identity, has been examined using various branches of CDA. This paper demonstrates that the keyness technique combined with concordance can reveal the ideology behind the representation of Self and Other in national identity construction relying on the discourse-historical approach (Wodak et al. 2009) as a theoretical basis. Accordingly, four discursive strategies that signal the presentation of Self and Other: constructive strategies, perpetuation strategies, transformation strategies, and dismantle strategies, are explored. As a methodology, the six-step outline proposed by Subtirelu and Baker (2018) was followed. A corpus was compiled with data from two focus group interviews. For the focus group interviews, ten participants were recruited purposefully from postgraduate students in University Utara Malaysia. As the study is on how Kurds depict Self and Other in their national identity construction discourses, only Kurdish students were reached. The paper seeks to contribute to the body knowledge of corpus linguistic analysis in the revelation of ideology through co-text and intertext. The findings display that Kurds emphasize the ingroup sameness and sharply distinguish themselves from their Other. However, they intend to confer a shade of vagueness on their other through depersonalizing and institutionalizing. Through the discursive construction of Kurdish national identity, the informants rely primarily on transformation and dismantling strategies.