The Model of Extended Lexical Unit: a corpus-based investigation of IDEOLOGY meaning

The main porous of this paper is twofold: 1) displaying how Sinclair’s model Of Extended Lexical Unit (ELU) could be operationalized to discover textual functions in Arabic Language,  and  2) applying the (ELU) model to explore the collocational meaning and linguistic profile of IDEOLOGY, one of the most frequent and ambiguous concept in Arabic media discourse. Methodologically, the analysis is based on a written contemporary corpus of Arabic (WMCA), consisting of 100 million words, indexed in CQP, and using the statistical measure T-score to identify the significant collocations of Ideology. The findings suggest the thorough application of the extended lexical unit in deducing the linguistic behavior of words, concepts, and phrases lexically, syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. Equally important, the outcomes of such analysis emphasize the neo-Firthian principle, that is the textual meaning is not coded in individual words, rather in phrasal units that extend across the surrounding co-textual environment. Thus, as the case study clarifies, Ideology has a more comprehensive collocational frame that contributes in forming its textual and attitudinal meaning(s) and conceptual characteristics than the dictionary definition suggests. Although this approach has been increasingly adopted in applied linguistics, particularly in lexicography, Arabic studies still far away in this concern. As a theoretical contribution, the present study suggests extending Sinclair’s model to include a macro level of analysis that deals with discourse, so that the model works on two-direct phases of analysis:  micro textual and macro discursive analysis.