Saudi Women Participation in Sports: Critical Analysis of Presupposition Strategies in Arabic Online News Discourse

Saudi women face many restrictions compared to other Arab or Muslim women as they have been barred (legally and or culturally) from doing many things by themselves or can only do some activities with the presence of a male guardian. Over the last two decades, there are many struggles recorded by the mass media, particularly the newspapers and the satellite channels. The media has been reported on the debates between groups demanding more rights for Saudi women and the conservative groups preserving the fundamental of Saudi's culture heavily based on the Islamic teaching and values. Hence, this paper examines the way modern standard Arabic online news of Al-Jazirah (AJ) of Saudi Arabia and BBC Arabic (BBCA) of United Kingdom portrayed the challenges faced by Saudi women in their involvement in international sporting events. This paper aims to analyse the ways that language is exploited in BBCA and AJ to report on struggles around the participation of Saudi women in sports, particularly in the used of presupposition strategies as one of discourse construction strategy utilised by the selected news outlets. Therefore, the paper critically examines news articles published by BBCA and AJ between 2010 and 2014 using a qualitative approach based on the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough, media discourse of Ruth Wodak and Discourse and ideology of Van Dijk. The preliminary result shows that the two news outlets have a different way of portraying the restriction of Saudi women' participation in international sporting events according to their ideologies. Thus, at the end of the study, the researchers reveal the outlets' stand on this issue. Hence, highlight the hidden ideologies at the back of the struggles in the construction of Arabic online news discourses around Saudi women in general.