Abstract Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) investigates the relationship between language, power, and society. Corpus linguistics (CL) is the study of language based on examples of real life language use. Over the last two decades, various scholars have combined some approaches and notions of CDA with the analytical framework of CL to examine the representation of several phenomena in relatively large texts. This study follows a corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis approach to investigate a 2.5 million word corpus of Arabic news articles by Jordan’s News Agency (PETRA). It demonstrates how some researchers following this approach may make some decisions, at some stages of their analysis, which are likely to affect their findings. These potential decisions may include selecting what statistical measures to use, what threshold to consider, what terms from the frequency, cluster, and collocation results to further investigate, which concordance lines to include in their study, and some others. In this study, I argue that some of these decisions can be made to suit the researchers’ preconceived assumptions and pre-existing hypotheses. The study concludes that using corpus linguistic techniques to discursively analyze large data reduces but not completely removes researchers’ bias.

中文翻译：

---

在（批判性）语篇研究中使用语料库语言学技术可以减少但不能消除偏见：阿拉伯语语料库中有关难民的证据

摘要批评语篇分析（CDA）研究语言，权力和社会之间的关系。语料库语言学（CL）是基于现实生活中语言使用示例的语言研究。在过去的二十年中，许多学者将CDA的一些方法和概念与CL的分析框架相结合，以研究相对较大的文本中若干现象的表示。这项研究遵循语料库辅助（批判性）话语分析方法，以调查约旦新闻社（PETRA）的250万个单词的阿拉伯新闻文章语料库。它表明了一些采用这种方法的研究人员如何在分析的某些阶段做出一些可能影响他们发现的决定。这些可能的决定可能包括选择要使用的统计量，要考虑的阈值，频率，聚类和搭配结果中的哪些术语需要进一步研究，研究中要包括哪些一致项目，等等。在这项研究中，我认为可以做出某些决定以适合研究人员的先入为主的假设和预先存在的假设。该研究得出的结论是，使用语料库语言技术对大数据进行话语分析可以减少但不能完全消除研究人员的偏见。