MARCO TEÓRICO

CDA as a school and method of discourse analysis has a distinctive feature. In other words, CDA has no fixed method of analysis, the same way as there is no specific method or set for data collection. This flexibility of CDA fostered the emergence of a variety of approaches and sub-schools as we saw earlier. Each approach has its justifications for the choice of the linguistic devices it uses for analysis. This depends significantly on the research questions and what we want to understand from the target discourse. In this study, since our main concern is to reveal the discursive strategies of legitimisations that both proponents and opponents of women driving use to legitimise their arguments and positions, the researcher expands on some of the legitimisation strategies that have been raised in previous works (Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2007, 2008; Van Leeuwen & Wodak 1999; Reyes, 2011). The researcher also makes new proposals and explains them by exploring the linguistics devices employed by speakers to construct their arguments. However, the general strategy of creating two groups (Us and Them) used in legitimisation constantly to construct the division between both ‘our group’

and ‘their group’ will be traced by analysing the discursive strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-self-presentation from Wodak (2001). This will include looking at

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the referential and prediction strategies used by both groups to portray Self, Other and women driving. Furthermore, each strategy of legitimisation will be compared with and explained by the argumentation schemes presented in Walton (1995), while SFL tools will be deployed when necessary.

Another essential component of the study is an examination of the way the public reflects on these videos through the comments sections. This includes exploring their perspectives towards the call of lifting the ban on women driving (oppose, support or neutral). It also seeks to discover the themes formed through these comments. This will be explained in more detail in the analysis of the UGC.

4.7.1 Analysis of the mass media content

In the current study, six strategies of legitimisation are highlighted and extensively analysed.

Those are the newly proposed strategy in this study (custody), the four categories prposed by Van Leeuwen (1996, 2007, 2008), and the (hypothetical future/potential implication) prposed by Reyes (2011):

1- Legitimisation through custody

This strategy occurs when speakers on mass media portray themselves as custodians of the public, fighting and pleading for their own good. They say what they say to save civil rights and enlighten them about a lost right or a potential conspiracy. This is identified through the constitution of two groups by the use of pronouns like ‘we’ and ‘they’, in which the speaker of the We group is associated with verbs or phrases that reflect care and sympathy (e.g. we care about, we will defend, we want to save…etc).

2- Legitimisation through authorisation

Authority legitimisation is the most common strategy and it has many subtypes; personal, impersonal, role model, expert, tradition, conformity (Van Leeuwen 1996, 2007; Van Leeuwen & Wodak 1999). Speakers use some of them individually or in combination with others to legitimise a change or the perpetuation of the status quo. This strategy can be

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identified when social actors back up their claims with the power of a third-party knowledge, control and/or social acceptance. This can happen when referring to an official’s statement (e.g. Minister of interiors states...), rules and laws (e.g. the 8^th article of the civil law...), a cleric or expertise opinion (e.g. Sheikh Ibn Baz said....), customs and social privacy or conformity (e.g. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women prohibited to drive).

3- Legitimisation through analogous evaluation/moral evaluation

In this strategy, legitimisation is based on a comparison between women driving and other similar activities/issues that have been conducted in the past, locally or internationally, and had adverse outcomes in case of de-legitimation or had positive results in the event of legitimation. It aims to highlight the potential results in both cases and what construction or destruction will happen to the values. However, this analogous evaluation might be used inversely to invalidate others claims, for example, Al-Nojaimi’s analogy in reply to the proponents use of the entire world conformity regarding women driving: “Most Islamic countries sell alcohol....does this mean they are right!?”. Moreover, it occurs when speakers try to exploit audience emotions by the process of moral evaluation whether in the form of evaluating themselves (e.g. Manal “I didn’t violate the law....,and I didn’t rebel against the ruler...) or by the evaluation of public audience (e.g. Najla: “ I trust our society....it is a society that is characterised with Islamic manners”).

4- Legitimisation through rationalisation

This legitimisation occurs when social actors present the legitimisation process as one where decisions have been made following thoughtful, pre-planned and evaluated procedures. This strategy is constructed linguistically through the use of some clauses such as Manal: “This is a result of a study and intensive reading”, or verbs that indicate verbal and mental processes like ‘consult’ and ‘investigate’. In other cases, the mere use of some hedging words that are not built on accurate statistics (e.g. ‘most’ and ‘minority’) but reflect some sense of precision can rationalise claims made by speakers.

71 5- Legitimisation through mythopesis

Here, legitimisation is achieved through telling stories where the hero follows a socially accepted practice that leads him/her to a happy ending or unhappy one when the hero is involved in immoral acts. Stories may also include the speaker’s personal experience in which he/she faced troubles or avoided them because of the status quo.

6- Legitimatisation through hypothetical future/potential implications (public chaos or women independence)

In this strategy, legitimisation occurs by creating good or bad potential future consequences for whether to change or perpetuate the status quo. In this study, proponents of women driving claims that it should be allowed for the sake of the future benefits it will bring to women and society in general while opponents pose a threat and severe repercussions to maintain the ban. This strategy is usually articulated through the use of some linguistic choices and structures like conditional sentences of If (e.g. If + present  will + infinitive), or phrases in other formats, but function as conditional sentence (e.g. Manal: “once we give a woman this right, we will open her a wide welcoming space”).

4.7.2 Analysis of the User-generated content (YouTube comments)

After collecting the first 75 comments posted on each video in a total number of 225 comments for all three videos, the analysis was performed in two phases. First, comments were classified manually into three different responses: ‘support’, ‘oppose’ or ‘neutral’.

Regarding the issue of women driving, any comment that demonstrated clear support for lifting the ban and allowing women to drive were coded as ‘support’. Comments that clearly object to women driving or the calls to lifting the ban were coded as ‘oppose’, while those reflecting none of the previous responses were coded as ‘neutral’. The second phase examined the main frames drawn from these observations regarding the issue of women driving.

However, these frames are worth investigating because they may not necessarily correspond to what have been discussed on mass media. In fact, they may yield some taboo topics, present causal interpretations and moral evaluations, and suggest solutions or ideas to solve the problem.

72 4.8 Summary

In this chapter, a historical background is provided to the issue of women driving in Saudi Arabia, highlighting the three campaigns to lift the ban since 1990. In addition, a brief biography of the main speakers of both groups was presented. More importantly, the conceptual design was discussed in brief, alongside an explanation of the method of data collection for both types; mass media content and user-generated content represented in the YouTube comments. Furthermore, it provided an explanation of the way data were transcribed and translated. Finally, the chapter outlined the methodology used in the analysis of both forms of data (mass media content and YouTube comments).

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