Changing Road Signs in Israel: Production and Perception

Awadallah, Nagham F.

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Description

Title

Changing Road Signs in Israel: Production and Perception

Author(s)

Awadallah, Nagham F.

Issue Date

2011-05-25T14:36:33Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Bhatt, Rakesh M.

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Linguistics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Sociolinguistics
• Palestine
• Israel
• Language in the media

Abstract

In Palestine/Israel the struggle to control the land and the people is not merely conducted through physical violence. More subtle attempts for controlling the region and labeling it as belonging for one side rather than the other are implemented. This paper focuses on an Israeli suggestion to change the orthography of city names on road signs so that they are transliterations of the Hebrew name of the city. This one event, the Israeli suggestion to change city names on road signs, is represented to the public by two competing, and mostly opposing, discourses. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to analyze four articles, two of which are written by Arabic media sources, and the other two are written by Israeli ones. This analysis is paired with a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the reactions of participants of different political affiliations to chosen excerpts of the articles. The paper aims at showing how one event is represented differently through different discourses, and how people who are affected be specific discourses react to them.

Graduation Semester

2011-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/24389

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2011 Nagham F. Awadallah

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