This paper is a corpus critical discourse analysis of the journalistic representations of Saudi women as they appear in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008). It follows a sociocognitive approach (van Dijk, 2008) to explore the thematic foci discussing issues related to Saudi women and to discuss the discursive strategies implemented to propagate such issues. The study has reached four findings. First, the thematic foci related to Saudi women are textually and referentially coherent as they were meant to provide a grand narrative underlying a specific context model. Second, Saudi women are negatively represented as no social roles are ascribed to them throughout the corpus. Third, different social actors are also represented alongside Saudi women to put them in a wider socio-cultural context to aggravate their problems. Finally, the most effective discursive strategies which mediated the running context model included victimization, categorization, stereotyping, normalization, and exaggeration.

Increased attention has been directed toward utilizing visual modes because linguistic modes cannot accurately depict L2 learners’ metaphorical conceptions of their language-acquisition experiences. The goal of this study was to investigate the mental images that Saudi EFL students may have in mind while learning a foreign language. To this end, both verbal and nonverbal metaphorical conceptions were investigated. An experimental group of 12 students was randomly selected. Both the learners’ written responses and drawn descriptions were evaluated to tap into the learners’ mental representations of foreign language learning. The multimodality-based analysis of the upper-intermediate learners’ metaphors demonstrated that the EFL learners’ metaphorical verbal and non-verbal representations had the same perspectives on learning a foreign language. The learners’ positive attitudes were also revealed by the extracted metaphorical concepts. Most of the metaphorical representations showed language learning as an exciting and uniquely personal experience. Few metaphorical representations showed that learning English was an awful experience.

This study investigates how language, gender, and culture are intertwined in two purpose-built corpora of Egyptian Arabic and American English proverbs. It discusses the ideological representations of the potentially gendered term “wife” in such proverbs, as well as the cultural affinities and discrepancies around them. The study has methodically operated at three stages, drawing on theoretical insights from feminist critical discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory: (1) determining the frequency of Arabic and English proverbs that represent the social actor “wife” in terms of the various socio-cultural roles assigned to them; (2) demarcating and comparing the principal themes and ideologies associated with the proverbial usage of the lexical term “wife” in Egyptian and American cultures; and (3) describing the underlying source domains that conceptually underpin and discursively legitimatize such themes and ideologies. Results revealed that, firstly, not all of the social functions associated with “wife” are covered in the American-English corpus due to cultural differences regarding the concept of the extended family. Second, the Egyptian-Arabic corpus often portrays the social actor “wife” negatively. Thirdly, to control the public mind regarding gender power dynamics, both corpora shared certain source domains. The wife’s negative portrayals are also used to justify gender hegemony and keep women suppressed, marginalized, and stigmatized.

The present study conducts a cognitive-semantic analysis of etymologically-related lexical pairs in the language of the Qur’an. Based on objective selection criteria, the lexical pair rīĥ (a singular form literally meaning wind) and riyāĥ (a plural form literally meaning winds) has been claimed to be representative of the final data set, which includes 20 lexical pairs. Building on the theoretical underpinnings of descriptive semantics and frame semantics, the analysis sought to fulfill three main objectives: (a) identifying the referential range of the pair rīĥ and riyāĥ and its central reference point; (b) explaining the way the historical and theological context helps to mark the connotations associated with each sense in the referential range; and (c) sorting the discourse functions communicated through the cognitive frame(s) evoked by such a lexical pair. Findings showed that the central cognitive frame of both lexical items is that of moving air. However, rīĥ has developed, through metaphorical extension, two other senses that are not applicable to riyāĥ: power/predominance and smell. Finally, both lexical items have been proven to have positive, negative, and neutral connotations that have been divinely manipulated to perform various discourse functions.

E-commerce software and applications are mainly designed to let business go globally with less cost and higher accessibility. The localization of such software and websites into several languages is intended for reaching the largest number of consumers through minimizing the impact of linguistic, cultural, and technical barriers. Such barriers are assumed to affect the quality of localization and accordingly the reliability of the e-commerce software of website. In exploring the persistent problems influencing localization quality in the Saudi context, this study sought to analyze consumers’ perceptions and attitudes regarding the Arabic version of Saudi Amazon (Arabic Amazon.sa) in respect of accessibility, readability, understandability, and translatability issues. Toward this overarching objective, two main research instruments have been used: an online survey covering diverse localization problems and a zoom-based open discussion with the website’s users to collect some concrete examples of the problems influencing the localization quality and website’s reliability. The findings showed that although localization adopts a functional approach to translation for the sake of reaching a large number of consumers, most of the users of the Arabic version of Amazon.sa developed a negative attitude. Such a negative attitude evolved owing to some salient problems that negatively affected the quality of localization and the reliability of website. Although website’s localizers managed to adapt the English version both technically and culturally, some other linguistically oriented problems prevailed including partial translations, vague and misleading translations of promotional texts, inconsistent translation of headings, the foreignization of the website’s settings, the absence of text boundaries, and the occasional mismatches between the website’s English and the Arabic versions.